Adopting or Adapting Policy Claims of the Radical Right? How Austrian Parties Cherry-Pick the Positions They Parrot

As can be seen across party systems, parties (particularly of the mainstream) have in recent years (re-)discovered the appeal of policies traditionally associated with and championed by the (populist) radical right. Despite differences across countries, these policies share a major concern, which lies in prioritizing and protecting the native population. Furthermore, empirical research has revealed that effects go beyond temporal shifts in issue saliencies when it comes to changes in parties’ campaigns in that which issues other parties put on their agenda is causally linked to the success of the populist radical right (PRR). What is still understudied, however, is the exact extent to which these issues get carried over in other parties’ programs as well as how these processes unfold systematically: do non-radical right parties adopt the same policy proposals as PRRs and does accommodation cut across all policy areas or do non-radical right parties cherry-pick the positions they ‘parrot’? Following the logic of ‘parroting the pariah’ we argue that other parties act strategically when they engage in accommodative strategies towards their opponents and do not just ‘copy’ nativist positions but rather adapt to them. To test this claim, we analyze Austrian party manifestos and develop a novel dictionary to assess the impact of PRRs on nativist positions of their political opponents.