Mainstreaming the Radical Right or Radicalizing the Mainstream?

This paper focuses on the question of whether radical right parties (RRPs) have an influence on other parties’ immigration and integration policies. The paper builds on earlier work on the ‘contagion effect’ of RRPs on other parties’ positions, but goes further by testing whether RRPs also influence the attention given to immigration and integration issues and the frames which are used. The paper also specifies under which conditions ‘contagion effects’ of RRPs are more likely to occur by focusing on intra-party unity and expected seat losses of competitor parties. The paper builds on a new dataset in which electoral manifestos of fourteen advanced industrialized democracies have been crowd-coded over multiple elections according to whether sentences relate to either immigration or integration. This allows distinguishing between the related but different topics of immigration and immigrant integration, as well as between positions and frames.