Talking Which Talk? Radical right parties and the salience of IOs

Research on the radical right widely agrees that these groups are skeptical of international organizations (IOs)- both because of their authority beyond the nation-state and because of the specific norms and policies these organizations seek to implement. How this translates into the discourse of radical-right parties, however, remains an open question. Existing research has mostly argued that more authoritative IOs foster more politicization, contributing thus to higher levels of IO salience in domestic party discourse. As a result, radical right parties, which are typically suspicious of supranational authorities, would engage with IOs more often than others. Alternative accounts suggest that IOs would be less salient for radical right parties, because these are less likely to invoke international contexts, norms, and activities and rather focus on domestic issues. In contrast, we argue that radical-right parties strategically target some IOs but not others in their domestic parliamentary discourse. As radical right parties strategically occupy specific policy positions for mobilization purposes, salience is high for IOs with mandates in policy fields linked to such positions (e.g., migration, gender). To systematically examine our expectation, we use text analysis and generate a dataset on the relative importance of fifteen IOs and their relevant sub-bodies in the parliamentary debates in eight European democracies. Our statistical analysis models the distinct contribution of radical right parties to the salience of IOs as a function of policy field convergence, adjusting the analysis for important contextual and dynamic confounders.