When Do Mainstream Parties Talk Like the Far Right? Evidence from Parliamentary Speeches in Western Europe

What leads mainstream elites to adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric? Anti-immigrant rhetoric has significant implications for everything from party politics to inter-group attitudes, and yet we know little about what induces mainstream parties to use such rhetoric in the first place. While existing research has shown that mainstream parties adopt restrictive immigration policies in response to electoral pressure from the far right, much less is known about when and why they also adopt anti-immigrant language in their communication. I address this shortcoming by identifying and analyzing anti-immigrant rhetoric in more than one million parliamentary speeches from nine European countries over a thirty-year period, combined with newly collected, fine-grained public opinion data. I show that mainstream parties tend to adopt anti-immigrant rhetoric following far-right party electoral success, corroborating findings from the literature on positional accommodation. Evidence also shows that far right party anti-immigrant rhetoric spills over into mainstream rhetoric, even independently from far right party success, which suggests that rhetorical accommodation may differ from positional accommodation in terms of the mechanisms through which far right influence is transmitted.