Tough Discourse – Soft Policy? The Impact of the Radical Right on Immigration Policymaking in Advanced Industrialised Countries

The rise of radical right parties (RRPs) has been accompanied by huge media coverage and sometimes strong public outcry, while scholars have investigated the underlying causes for breakthrough and its support bases extensively; its impact on public policy has been neglected so far. Immigration policy is particularly prone to evaluate the radical right’s impact on public policy since immigration is one of the core issues of RRPs’ electoral platforms. Whether there have been effects or not is disputed among scholars, however, their findings are often based on single country cases or single time points. Thus, systematic and rigorous examination of the degree to which the radical right influenced immigration policy is still missing from the picture. Based on a novel dataset on the immigration policies of the OECD member states over the last three decades the paper studies both direct and indirect impact of radical right parties on immigration policy.