Gatekeeping or vote-seeking? The dilemma mainstream parties’ face when strategically shifting right on migration

Much attention has been devoted to the role which established centre right and -left parties play in the mainstreaming of the far right in liberal democracies (Brown et al., 2021). When mainstream parties accommodate similar reactionary demands and discourses used by the far right, then this has a legitimising effect (Mondon and Winter, 2020). In the party competition literature, it is argued that mainstream parties accommodate reactionary anti-migration positions if they believe that this will result in electoral gains (Meguid, 2008). This is consistent with their strategic vote-seeking behaviour. At the same time, mainstream parties are traditionally seen as political gatekeepers in liberal democracies tasked with countering radical/extreme politics and upholding liberal values (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). If they use reactionary anti-migration discourses when accommodating the far right, this can lead to public backlash if they are seen to be deviating from their gatekeeping role. This poses a dilemma for mainstream parties caught between their vote-seeking and gatekeeping roles. In this paper, I study this dilemma by examining how and why mainstream parties in the UK adopt anti-migration discourses in parliamentary debates. I combine qualitative content analysis, qualitative comparative, and critical discourse analysis to study a corpus of debates on migration held in the House of Commons from 2000 to 2014. The preliminary analysis supports existing research indicating that incumbent centre right parties take up anti-migration positions in response to economic downturns (Rhodes et al., 2019) and far right challengers (Abou-Chadi, 2016), but fails to find a consistent pattern for Labour. The findings furthermore suggest that mainstream parties navigate the dilemma between their vote-seeking and gatekeeping behaviour by enacting borderline discourses (Krzyżanowski and Ledin, 2017) which allow them to simultaneously signal tougher positions on migration, but also commitment to liberal democracy.