From Votes to Agendas: How Radical Right Parties Shape Political Discourse and Legislative Output in Europe

There is a broad consensus about how radical parties influence mainstream parties within the electoral arena. However, we know little about the influence of radical parties after the election period. This paper moves beyond the electoral space and brings together studies on party and issue competition to measure the influence of radical right parties on agenda-setting in European democracies. While current studies measure policy position change, I offer an assessment of radical right parties' influence on symbolic and substantive agendas, analyzing government communications and legislative output from 2000 to 2025 across multiple European countries. Using fixed-effects Poisson regression on government communications and legislative output, I show that radical right parties consistently influence symbolic agendas, while their impact on substantive agendas varies considerably. Government ideology and institutional constraints do not change the significance of the relationship between radical right parties and issue attention in government communication, but they play a critical role in shaping legislative output, with conditions such as ideological proximity and fewer actors involved in decision-making moderating radical right party influence. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of party competition and agenda-setting, highlighting the conditional and context-dependent nature of radical right party influence in parliamentary activities and the asymmetry of their impact on rhetoric versus legislative output.