Polarising Debates: Challenger Parties and Elite Polarisation in Sweden and the Netherlands

Scholars have raised alarm regarding the consequences of polarization among political elites in the US Congress. In Europe, globalization and the deep divisions surrounding it may pose challenges for the functioning of parliamentary democracy. However, we know little about how this has affected polarization among European political elites. We help to fill this gap by assessing polarization in the Swedish Riksdag and the Dutch Tweede Kamer – two European parliaments that differ considerably by the make-up and dynamics of the party systems they represent, but which have both seen the establishing of populist challenger parties. We suggest that the cultural conflicts that come with the parliamentary representation of these parties transform elite polarization. More specifically, we expect that debates which relate to the cultural conflicts emerging from globalization will initially show more pronounced increases in polarization. However, the institutional environment and, in particular, the strategies chosen by the party leaderships, conditions how strongly polarization in these cultural conflicts will affect interactions in the parliamentary arena and thus the overall level of elite polarization. To assess elite polarization empirically, we observe polarization in legislative speech from 1994 to 2018 in both countries using a machine learning approach which classifies positional separations in a set of issue categories.