Parliamentary identity and the management of the far‐right: A discursive analysis of Dutch parliamentary debates

Abstract

In many Western democratic societies, the far-right has considerable popular support and is often perceived as the winner of political debates. This raises the important question of how other politicians try to manage the far-right. We use parliamentary debates to examine how politicians define the identity of Member of Parliament (MP) in response to Geert Wilders, leader of the far-right Party for Freedom in the Netherlands. The analysis shows that politicians made relevant the shared responsibility of MPs to solve societal problems, by using inclusive language, asking for concrete proposals, and emphasizing engagement in debate. These identity-related features question the parliamentary role performance of the far-right. In response, Wilders stressed the MP's responsibility of representing the ordinary people. The politicians used three strategies to challenge this defence: Questioning that the far-right actually fulfils their selfascribed representative role; challenging the notion that only the far-right would represent the people; moving into a more populist position. Implications for social psychological research on marginal group members are discussed.

Debating the legal recognition of gender identity in parliamentary discourse: Human rights and queer politics

“…What is also noticeable (and characteristic of far-right parties' rhetoric) is that the speaker strategically asserts a minority parliamentary identity, while claiming to represent a wide audience (see Verkuyten and Nooitgedagt, 2018), that of Greek people.…”

The wealth paradox: Prosperity and opposition to immigration

“…Triangulation of research methods is key and for social psychological theorising to have impact in disciplines other than our own, a multimethod approach is required, complementing survey and experimental evidence with historical analyses, case studies and qualitative studies (see for example Verkuyten & Nooitgedagt, 2018). First, when it comes to understanding these big challenges of our time relating to support for populism, it is clear that more is needed than the expertise of one discipline on its own and there is a need to be multidisciplinary and integrative, exploring the issue at various levels of analysis.…”

“…That is, even though social psychologists' ability to isolate phenomena, to study them without contamination and to determine causality through experimentation has been a strength of our field, relying solely on experimental evidence only allows for a limited understanding of the phenomenon at hand. Triangulation of research methods is key and for social psychological theorising to have impact in disciplines other than our own, a multimethod approach is required, complementing survey and experimental evidence with historical analyses, case studies and qualitative studies (see for example Verkuyten & Nooitgedagt, 2018). This is all the more important because, even though social scientists other than social psychologists may appreciate experimental evidence, they also often fail to engage with it because it is seen as not capturing the dynamics at work in complex national contexts.…”

Who’s Homeless and Whose Homeless?

“…My empirical data are primarily excerpts from the Swedish Parliament (Sveriges Riksdag, n.d.-a, n.d.-b, n.d.-c) September 2015-December 2019. Parliament debates and committee reports are important data in political and social science research and frequently subjected to discourse analysis (Davidsson, 2010;Kronick & Rousseau, 2015;Verkuyten & Nooitgedagt, 2019). Rightwing and racist discourses, in particular, have been studied in several countries since the 1980s (Fairclough, 2001(Fairclough, , 2003Potter & Wetherell, 1987;van Dijk, 1998).…”