Rethinking Right-Wing Party Classification: The Case of Poland’s Law and Justice from a Migration Studies Perspective

The classification of right-wing parties in contemporary Europe remains a contentious issue. Such parties as Poland’s Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwość, PiS), Hungary’s Fidesz or Switzerland’s Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei, SVP) were once considered conservative or mainstream right, whereas currently they are increasingly labelled as radical or far-right. This study addresses the challenges associated with existing approaches to categorising right-wing parties, using Poland’s PiS as a case study and focuses on a hallmark characteristic of radical right parties: their anti-immigration stance. To this end, PiS is compared with Confederation (Konfederacja), a party widely regarded as representing the radical right in Poland without significant controversy. This study has adopted a mixed-method approach. First, an online expert survey, inspired by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), was conducted with two groups of Polish scholars specialising in migration policy and/or political parties, selected upon their publication records. This survey extends the CHES approach by examining party positions on various types of immigration rather than treating immigration as a monolithic category, to capture the differences in the stances of different right-wing parties on immigration. Experts were also asked to classify Polish political parties into ideological families using the typology employed in CHES. Second, in-depth interviews were conducted with participants, both those who categorised PiS as a conservative party and those who classified it as a radical right. These interviews provided qualitative insight into the reasoning behind their classifications and the nuances of PiS’s political positioning on immigration. Existing methods of party classification often fail to reflect the diversity within the political right. The findings of this research contribute to the scholarly debate on the classification of right-wing parties, drawing attention to the growing tendency to group diverse parties under the broad label of ‘radical right’, which can obscure important distinctions between them.