When mainstream parties accommodate radical-right parties, do citizens grow more concerned about immigration? Based on a rich literature, we argue that challenger parties’ ability to affect mainstream party positions, particularly on immigration, is associated with greater public salience of immigration and voter positivity towards challengers exists. We use Comparative Manifesto Project and Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data in order to show that challenger issue entrepreneurship, and mainstream accommodation are associated with greater public concern for challenger issues. These factors do not result in greater public positivity towards challengers. Our findings thus support the argument that a mainstream party accommodative strategy might not be as beneficial for them as often expected by pundit and political scientists alike. This has implications for understanding the effect of indirect party strategies on public attitudes, since mainstream accommodation changes public concern regarding issues, which may bolster challengers’ positions, including radical-right parties.

While 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.

How does a political party become ‘mainstream’? And what makes some parties receive arguably the opposite designation – ‘pariah party’? This conceptual article examines the processes by which parties’ mainstream or pariah status must be constructed, negotiated and policed, not only by political scientists in the pursuit of case selection, but by several actors actively involved in the political process, including media actors and political parties themselves. It explains how these actors contribute to these processes of ‘mainstreaming’ and ‘pariahing’, considers their motivations and provides illustrative examples of how such processes take place. As such, the article moves beyond the literature on the ways in which mainstream parties seek to deal with or respond to threats from a variety of pariah parties, instead paying attention to how those parties have been constructed as pariahs in the first place, and how these processes simultaneously contribute to the maintenance of mainstream party identities.

Why are populist radical right parties (PRRPs) more successful in some countries than in others? This question is analysed here by focusing on Belgium. While Flanders (the northern, Dutch-speaking part of Belgium) was home to one of the strongest far-right movements in Europe, Wallonia (the southern, francophone part) has remained ‘immune’ to such tendencies. The article argues that different historical experiences have given rise to a hostile political environment for PRRPs in Wallonia, where mainstream parties and the media have created a successful cordon sanitaire. In Flanders, mainstream parties and the media have gradually become more accommodative towards PRRPs. By emphasizing the sociopolitical context in which parties operate, the findings suggest that the reactions of mainstream parties and the media are crucial to understanding the success of PRRPs. The conclusion reflects on potential lessons to be drawn from the Belgian case for mainstream parties and media practitioners elsewhere.

This article examines the conditions under which interest groups interact with political parties. Existing research finds that interest group–political party interactions in most western democracies have become more open and contingent over time. The close ideological and formal organisational ties that once characterised these relations have gradually been replaced by alternative, more pragmatic forms of cooperation. However, most of this research stresses the importance of the structural factors underpinning these links over time and across countries, but sheds little light on the factors driving short-term interest group–party interactions. Here, by drawing on survey data on Spanish interest groups obtained between December 2016 and May 2017, this article seeks to fill this gap by taking into account party status, issue salience and a group’s resources as explanatory variables. It shows that mainstream parties are the primary targets of interest groups, that groups dealing with salient issues are more likely to contact political parties and that the groups with most resources interact with a larger number of parties.

Despite the explosion of populism research, there is a shortage of comprehensive analyses of the ideational varieties of populist parties and of the different roles they play in contemporary party systems. In order to overcome such limitations, I provide a state-of-the-art review of the literature on the classification of populist parties and make three innovative contributions to populism research. First, by adopting a truly pan-European perspective to cover, in addition to EU member countries, contexts that are generally overlooked, including but not limited to Liechtenstein, Russia, Serbia and Ukraine, this review article provides an empirical application of the ideational approach to populism to 66 contemporary parties. Second, it highlights the major shortcomings of common approaches to the study of populist parties in contemporary party systems, which almost invariably treat them as ‘challengers’ or ‘outsiders’. Finally, it pushes the agenda further by providing a classification and empirical overview of the three interactive patterns characterizing the 66 populist parties under analysis: non-integration, negative integration and positive integration.