Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties

Abstract

This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties (RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions would reduce the radical right's success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive. Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evaluate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

Sympathy for the devil? Voter support for illiberal politicians

“…Even if policy congruence seems to represent an aisle for liberal actors by closing the policy-related gap and thus pulling voters away from illiberal politicians, this is rather unlikely to happen: While parties might attract some voters by shifting their policy positions, such a maneuver could also backfire through losing others (Chou et al, 2021). There is also no guarantee that such a policy shift toward illiberal parties reduces their electoral success (Krause et al, 2022;Lewandowsky and Wagner, 2022). Therefore, based on our results, it would be premature to conclude that democracy can be strengthened by mainstream parties adopting the position of radical and illiberal competitors .…”

How voter distributions, issue ownership, and position influence party emphasis

“…Extending this logic, a party that holds a positional but not issue ownership advantage may choose to emphasize a unimodal asymmetrical issue if the party is focused on long-term gains rather than short-term losses. As research suggests that a party shifting position on an issue and emphasizing that issue likely pushes voters toward the issue-owning party in that election (Krause, Cohen, and Abou-Chadi 2019;Meijers and Williams 2020), a party with a positional advantage on an issue but not ownership would be expected to place greater emphasis on an issue with a unimodal asymmetrical voter distribution if that party uses a long-term electoral strategy. 10 This is particularly the case when party emphasis on an issue influences public perceptions of party positions on that issue, leading voters to recognize the party without issue ownership as positionally advantaged (Meyer and Wagner 2020;Wagner and Meyer 2017).…”

How challenger party issue entrepreneurship and mainstream party strategies drive public issue salience: evidence from radical-right parties and the issue of immigration

“…It is possible that increased salience of a challenger party issue does not result in increased absolute positivity towards challenger parties, but greater positivity relative to other parties in the system. In fact, existing research at the aggregate level suggests that increased salience due to accommodation can drive voters away from mainstream parties (Meijers and Williams, 2020), and towards challenger parties (Krause et al, 2019).…”

“…When center-right or center-left parties, respectively, in a country hold positions more similar to radical-right parties on immigration, individuals are more likely to view immigration as a most important problem facing the country. While this process appears to be intuitive, and, in fact has been assumed in a substantial amount of literature on the effects of mainstream party accommodation of challenger parties (see Krause et al, 2019;Meijers and Williams, 2020;Hutter and Kriesi, 2021), it has never before been demonstrated. This study, however, seeks to specifically test this commonly spelled out assumption.…”

“…This presupposes that accommodation increases the salience of the challenger issue. Similarly, Krause et al (2019) and Meijers and Williams (2020) find that mainstream party accommodation of challenger issues leads to challenger parties gaining vote share, and mainstream parties losing vote share. Further, Hutter and Kriesi (2021) show that radical-right parties benefited from centre-right emphasis and accommodation.…”