Going Local? How Mainstream Parties React to the Local Framing of Migration by the Radical Right

This article investigates the local dimension of the Radical Right's discourse on migration. In a first step, this paper analyzes whether radical right parties adjust their communication to the local context. While these parties portray migration mainly as a cultural threat, they can be expected to highlight economic aspects of migration in economically deprived constituencies. In a second step, this paper zeroes in on the consequences of radical right's communication on migration for local party competition. It is examined how centre-left and centre-right parties react to the framing of the radical right and whether their responses differ locally. Here, I hypothesize that the reaction of mainstream parties hinges on the electoral threat by the radical right. The more electorally threatening radical right candidates are, the more centre-left and centre-right candidates engage with the framing of the radical right candidate in their constituency. The empirical analysis relies on a newly compiled dataset consisting of social media posts on Twitter and Facebook by candidates running in the 2017 German parliamentary elections as well as state-level members of parliament. The framing of these posts is first identified using a supervised machine-learning approach before matching them with contextual data of candidates' constituencies.