SOME THINGS NEVER CHANGE? Examining the Effects of Government Participation on the Radical Right’s Anti-Immigrant Discourse

Abstract

This thesis examines the effects of government participation on the anti-immigrant discourse of Western European radical right parties (RRPs). As it stands, most of the current literature has exclusively focused on RRP policy moderation and the effects of office-seeking strategies on the party family’s anti-immigrant rhetoric. This has ultimately left the question of how entering government affects an RRP’s framing of immigrants largely unanswered. To address this research gap, I conduct a qualitative content analysis on 16 party platforms and manifestos published by the Austrian Freedom Party, Italian National Alliance, and the Norwegian Progress Party: three RRPs of differing ideologies and backgrounds that have previously participated in coalition governments. In this analysis, I leverage a theoretical framework based on framing theory to categorize the ways that these parties portray immigrants as threats to the native populations of their respective countries. The documents included in the sample were published before and during the three RRPs’ time in government to determine if there are notable differences in how the parties framed immigrants between the two periods. Ultimately, I find little evidence that Western European RRPs significantly change or moderate the way that they frame immigrants after entering government. The parties did not become more fixated on socioeconomic issues related to immigration or decrease the radicalness of their sociocultural anti-immigrant frames, which suggests the absence of an inclusion-moderation effect. Given that the anti-immigrant rhetoric of these parties remained stable, this casts further doubt on whether RRPs that enter government ever become mainstream parties.