Normalisation of far-right stances likely to affect success of such parties at ballot boxes across Europe, say researchers
Mainstream parties are increasingly allowing the far right to set the agenda, researchers in Germany have found, describing it as a shortcoming that had unwittingly helped the far right by legitimising their ideas and disseminating them more widely.
The findings, published in the European Journal of Political Research, were based on an automated text analysis of 520,408 articles from six German newspapers over the span of more than two decades.
The Berlin-based researchers found that as the far right moved from fringe issues in the late 1990s to topics such as integration and migration, mainstream parties had increasingly reshaped their communications to respond, boosting the spread of these ideas and signalling to voters that these ideas and stances were legitimate.
The overarching result had crucial implications for democracy, said Teresa Völker, a political sociologist at Berlin Social Science Center and co-author of the study. “Political communication by mainstream parties plays a central role in the electoral success of the far right,” she said. “This factor has been underestimated.”
