From Fringe to Mainstream: Turkish Far-Right Parties' Influence on Legislative Agenda

Far-right parties have been gaining importance globally, making it crucial to understand how parties at the fringes of the political spectrum make politics and exert influence. This study examines the extent to which far-right parties influence the agenda and increase their political power. This research focuses on two distinct far-right parties in Turkey: the religiously oriented New Welfare Party (YRP), which maintains ideological affinity with the governing Justice and Development Party, and the nationalist (anti-immigrant) Victory Party (ZP), a splinter from the junior coalition partner, the Nationalist Action Party. This case holds importance as it features two distinct sections of the far-right: the nationalist ZP, which remained in opposition and did not form an electoral alliance, and the religiously oriented YRP, which ultimately joined the incumbents' People’s Alliance despite its opposition origins. Using the ZP brings in a crucial contrast, in addition to the ideological difference, since other political parties representing their line of politics merge under the incumbent alliance. The study employs a multi-stage temporal design to investigate the diffusion of ideas from far-right political actors to parliamentary members. In the first phase, we will create a novel corpus by scraping text data from the official YouTube channels of the two parties prior to the 2023 general elections in Turkey. In addition to transcripts, parliamentary minutes prior to and after the elections will be included. Following the generation of coherent topics via LLM-enhanced BERTopic, an actor-topic affiliation network will be created. In this bipartite graph, one set of nodes represents actors, while the other set represents topics. An edge is established between an actor and a topic if that actor’s discourse is strongly assigned to that specific topic cluster. This structure immediately translates the semantic space into a measurable social structure, allowing us to quantify the degree of actors' participation in different policy debates and track the temporal evolution of topic adoption for subsequent diffusion analysis. Finally, the diffusion results will be tested against a separate actor network based on formal alliances and shared biographical/political career attributes (homophily). ERGM will be used to examine if actors linked by alliances and homophily are significantly more likely to share the same LLM-derived topics or to adopt them at similar times, thus confirming the social channel of semantic diffusion. Overall, we investigate whether and to what extent far-right parties influence the legislative agenda in a context of competitive authoritarianism. This research is important as it enables the analysis of the influence of political elites who are considered to be on the fringes of the political spectrum. Therefore, understanding how these actors relate to the mainstream actors will allow us to expand our insights beyond top leaders. Finally, comparing the ideological alignment with other motivations for far-right political parties will provide an opportunity to see how differences in institutions in authoritarian settings might lead to unlikely alliances and open pathways to success for far-right parties.