Recent research focuses on radical right parties’ framing of anti-immigration positions by invoking the protection of groups perceived as vulnerable, such as women or sexual minorities—a discourse known respectively as femonationalism and homonationalism. While existing studies have examined the effects of such rhetoric and other have provided case study of it, we lack systematic evidence on its prevalence over time, across countries and parties. This article develops an original measure of this kind of rhetoric, by leveraging over 200,000 press releases issued by political parties in four Western European countries and linking them to survey data on public attitudes.
The analysis identifies when and under what conditions radical right parties deploy this rhetoric, and how mainstream parties respond and occasionally adopt similar discursive strategies. Beyond women and sexual minorities, the study shows that RRPs increasingly extend this logic liberal framing of nationalism to other groups (e.g., Jewish communities) and to abstract values such as democracy and environmental protection. These findings advance our understanding of how RRPs reshape political competition by reappropriating the issues of women minority rights and moral protection to legitimize exclusionary agendas.
