Reframing moderation: Frame moderation as a radical-right party strategy

Many radical-right parties across Western Europe have normalized electorally while holding stable, hardline positions on immigration. This paper argues that these parties have moderated the perception of their core policies not through positional moderation, but through frame moderation: they change how they justify a policy without necessarily changing the policy itself, altering the considerations through which voters perceive their position. Conceptually, the paper distinguishes the range of frames a party invokes from the frequency with which it invokes these frames. Empirically, it develops a scalable measure of framing width and of change within frame categories using a novel method of sentence embeddings. Its usefulness is illustrated with the case of the French National Rally’s framing of immigration across manifestos from 1997 to 2022. As the party normalized, it widened its range of frames, increased its framing of immigration in terms of economic considerations, and moved from a cultural frame that emphasized ethnic homogeneity toward one that focuses on the defense of secularism and gender equality. Frame moderation enables stigmatized parties to appear more mainstream without moderating their positions. This suggests that positional measures alone may understate how radical-right parties have changed.