Embracing Euroscepticism? A Fine-Grained Analysis of Mainstream Parties’ Responses to the Radical Right Using Parliamentary Speeches

Are mainstream parties becoming more Eurosceptic in reaction to the success of radical right Eurosceptic parties? While the existing literature on party competition points out that mainstream parties are responding by moving closer to their radical right rivals on certain issues (Meijers 2017; Abou-Chadi 2021), these studies primarily capture positional shifts by using data from party manifestos or expert surveys, focusing solely on changes between election years. This study adopts a different approach and analyses parliamentary speeches to assess whether this Eurosceptic shift represents a lasting change or is a merely temporary adjustment confined to election periods. We expect the effect of radical right success on mainstream party stances to be gradual and cumulative, intensifying as elections approach and depending more on the sustained success of radical right parties over multiple election cycles than on the magnitude of their success in the immediately preceding elections. Building on the ParlSpeech dataset, we analyze speeches from plenary sessions in 8 key legislatures, covering a 20-year period. We employ a neural network classifier to categorize speeches at the sentence level into five issue domains reflecting key areas of EU contestation: Cultural, Socioeconomic, Legitimacy, EU Reforms, and Enlargement. The aggregated party-level scores are our measure of party stance. The radical right’s vote share in the previous election, the time until the next election, and their interaction are the key independent variables. The paper aims to shed light on whether Eurosceptic shifts are part of a broader strategic realignment or a limited electoral strategy.