Immigration policy and electoral competition in Western Europe

Abstract

This article estimates policy positions of mainstream parties and radical right parties in seven countries in Western Europe over the past two decades. The assumption that mainstream parties have moved rightwards under pressure from the electoral success of radical right parties is assessed in close-up. A fine-grained analysis has been used to measure party distances in this specific policy field. Moreover, the new dataset is sufficiently differentiated to enable the identification of specific programmatic strategies followed by mainstream parties. The article concludes that the impact of radical right parties on mainstream policy agendas tends to be overestimated.