Abstract
AbstractWhile the structure of party competition evolves slowly, crisis-like events can induce short-term change to the political agenda. This may be facilitated by challenger parties who might benefit from increased attention to issues they own. We study the dynamic of such shifts through mainstream parties’ response to the 2015 refugee crisis, which strongly affected public debate and election outcomes across Europe. Specifically, we analyse how parties changed their issue emphasis and positions regarding immigration before, during, and after the refugee crisis. Our study is based on a corpus of 120,000 press releases between 2013 and 2017 from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. We identify immigration-related press releases using a novel dictionary and estimate party positions. The resulting monthly salience and positions measures allow for studying changes in close time-intervals, providing crucial detail for disentangling the impact of the crisis itself and the contribution of right-wing parties. While we provide evidence that attention to immigration increased drastically for all parties during the crisis, radical right parties drove the attention of mainstream parties. However, the attention of mainstream parties to immigration decreased toward the end of the refugee crisis and there is limited evidence of parties accommodating the positions of the radical right.
Highlights
The literature on party competition has typically stressed long-term trends
While we argue that parties can hardly afford to ignore the immigration issue in reaction to the refugee crisis and radical right pressure, our two-step interpretation of Meguid’s (2005) framework provides mainstream parties with more leeway regarding their positional reactions
Since we argue that the crisis has generally empowered radical right parties to pressure their competitors, we shall emphasize the diverse histories of the radical right parties we treat as functional equivalents during the crisis: Both the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ) and the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) were mainstream right parties that radicalized toward a nationalist, populist, and anti-immigration position during the 1990s (McGann and Kitschelt, 2005, p. 20; Kriesi et al, 2008, p. 20)
Summary
Our analysis builds on the premise that the refugee crisis had a direct effect and radically changed the importance of the immigration issue in the short run. We argue that highly salient public. Political Science Research and Methods 3 events like crises have important indirect and immediate effects that change the “rules of engagement” on an issue. They put topics on the party-system agenda and force other parties to address an issue, whether it is beneficial to them or not. We build our argument in several steps: First, we argue that the crisis increases the general salience of immigration due to parties’ quest to appear responsive. We argue that events like the 2015 crisis have a powerful role in shaping salience strategies by increasing the so-called “problem pressure” Hypothesis 1: Parties increase their attention to immigration with the start of the refugee crisis
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