Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties

Abstract

This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties (RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions would reduce the radical right's success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive. Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evaluate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results suggest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this literature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.

Full text

RESEARCH NOTE
Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies
and the success of radical right parties
Werner Krause1, Denis Cohen2and Tarik Abou-Chadi3*
1
Humboldt University of Berlin, Berlin, Germany,
2
University Mannheim, MZES, Mannheim, Germany and
3
University of
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
*Corresponding author. Email: tarik.abou-chadi@politics.ox.ac.uk
(Received 24 April 2020; revised 16 June 2021; accepted 29 October 2021)
Abstract
This research note investigates how mainstream party strategies affect the success of radical right parties
(RRPs). It is a widespread view that mainstream party accommodation of radical right core issue positions
would reduce the radical right’s success. Empirical evidence for this claim, however, remains inconclusive.
Using party level data as well as micro-level voter transitions between mainstream and RRPs, we re-evalu-
ate the effectiveness of accommodative strategies and also test whether they work contingent on specific
conditions, e.g., the newness of radical right challengers or the existence of a cordon sanitaire. We do not
find any evidence that accommodative strategies reduce radical right support. If anything, our results sug-
gest that they lead to more voters defecting to the radical right. Our findings have important implications
for the study of multi-party competition as they challenge what has become a core assumption of this lit-
erature: that accommodative strategies reduce niche party success.
Keywords: Comparative politics; elections and campaigns; political behavior; political parties and interest groups
The growing success of radical right parties (RRPs) has spurred considerable debate surrounding
the causes and consequences of their ascent. A core question within both the academic and the
broader public debate concerns the behavior of mainstream parties and how it affects the electoral
fortunes of the radical right. The belief that accommodative strategies are beneficial, if not
imperative in confronting radical right challengers remains widespread among politicians, pun-
dits, and large parts of European publics. In political science, the influential work of Meguid
(2005,2008) argues that niche parties are less successful when established parties choose accom-
modative strategies, i.e., when they emphasize the niche parties’most important issue and coopt
its issue position. Following this rationale, RRPs should be less successful when established parties
adopt restrictive immigration positions. Empirical research indeed shows that mainstream parties
seem to follow this rationale and overwhelmingly adopt accommodative strategies in response to
radical right success (Han, 2015; Abou-Chadi, 2016; Abou-Chadi and Krause, 2020).
In contrast, other scholars argue that the adoption of radical right positions by established par-
ties legitimizes and popularizes this type of discourse. Increased salience of immigration, along
with a discourse that has shifted toward the radical right, should therefore strengthen RRPs
because voters—in the words of long-time Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen—“prefer
the original to the copy”(Arzheimer and Carter, 2006; Dahlström and Sundell, 2012; Mudde,
2019).
In this research note, we provide a series of new tests on the (conditional) effectiveness of
accommodative strategies on radical right success across a broad set of West European electoral
© The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the European Political Science Association. This is an Open
Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which
permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Political Science Research and Methods (2022), page 1 of 8
doi:10.1017/psrm.2022.8
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

contexts between 1976 and 2017. In contrast to Meguid (2005,2008) and other studies using data
from the “third wave”(Mudde, 2019) of the radical right between 1980 and 2000, we thereby
include many observations from the recent and persistent “fourth wave”of the European radical
right. Furthermore, we present first-time evidence on how a large variety of context factors con-
ditions the effectiveness of accommodative strategies, including characteristics of RRPs, their
mainstream competitors, as well as the broader political context.
We investigate the electoral consequences of political accommodation at the macro level—
focusing on RRPs’election results—and the micro level—exploring vote switching between main-
stream and radical right parties. Whereas our macro-level analyses speak to the question if main-
stream party strategies can reduce support for the radical right, our micro-level analyses present
novel evidence on the question if mainstream parties that accommodate benefit themselves by
pulling voters from the radical right. In our analyses, we test whether accommodative strategies
impact the change in RRPs’vote share between two consecutive elections. We find neither general
nor conditional support for the claim that accommodative strategies significantly reduce support
for the radical right. To the contrary, voters are on average more likely to defect to the radical
right when mainstream parties adopt anti-immigration positions, a pattern that has been particu-
larly pronounced for established RRPs. Overall, our findings suggest that positional accommoda-
tion is fruitless in the best case, and can be detrimental in the worst case. This result contributes
to existing experimental studies that directly address potential endogeneity issues between party
position shifts and citizens’voting behavior, but are limited in terms of the generalizability across
political contexts (Hjorth and Larsen, 2020; Chou et al., 2021). Extensive robustness checks cor-
roborate the credibility of our findings.
Our study contributes to a growing literature on the dynamics of party competition. It empir-
ically challenges the widespread and persistent view that accommodation reduces support for
niche parties and especially for the radical right. The implications of our study are, however,
not only limited to the academic debate but also challenge the widely held belief in today’s pol-
itical debate that the adoption of more authoritarian-nationalist and anti-immigration positions
by mainstream parties would curb the success of the radical right.
Empirical strategy
Our first set of analyses focuses on the party level. Here, we regress changes in radical right vote
shares on the positional shifts of all relevant mainstream parties in a given election. We do so
using a stacked data structure, where every outcome is replicated by the number of mainstream
parties and subsequently matched with the policy shifts of each mainstream party. This allows us
to analyze over 350 mainstream party strategies from 108 electoral contexts between 1976 and
2017.
1
We use linear models with country fixed effects and election-clustered standard errors.
To account for the multiplication of identical outcomes due to stacking, we use fractional fre-
quency weights such that, e.g., two duplicate radical right vote shares explained by the policy
shifts of two different mainstream parties are each weighted by 0.5.
In a second step, we shift our attention to the individual level where we study vote switching
between mainstream and radical right parties in consecutive elections. This is important
because the aggregate view does not allow for isolating voter reactions to the strategic position-
ing of a given party. For instance, even if aggregate results suggested that accommodation
reduces support for the radical right, this would not necessarily indicate that previous radical
right voters switched to those parties that actively sought to accommodate the radical right.
1
We analyze elections in the following twelve countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. The time period covered begins in the 1970s in order
to capture the rise of “third-wave”RRPs, such as the French Front National. Due to this, we also investigate the electoral
prospects of early RRPs in their marginalization and breakthrough phase.
2 Werner Krause et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

Instead, decreasing vote shares of RRPs could for example result from mobilizing former
non-voters.
Using a newly compiled data set that marries voting data from rounds 2–4 of the Comparative
Study of Electoral Systems, the European Voter Project, and nearly 30 national election studies,
we analyze 228 instances of voter migration between mainstream and RRPs across 70 elections
from 13 West European polities. We again generate a stacked data matrix, which pairs individual
respondents with each of the mainstream parties competing in the corresponding electoral con-
text. Using recall questions on respondents’voting behavior in the current and previous general
elections, we record for each voter–party dyad if voters switched from the respective mainstream
party to RRPs, from RRPs to the respective mainstream party, or neither.
2
We then use this
switching indicator as the outcome variable in a series of hierarchical regressions models,
where random intercepts at the party-election level capture nominal percentages of the RRPs’
voter transfers with a given mainstream party. Additionally, election and country level random
intercepts capture the dependence among parties from the same electoral contexts and same
countries, respectively. In line with the approach of our macro-level analysis, we explain this vari-
ation in aggregate dyadic losses, gains, and net transfers as a function of mainstream parties’pos-
itional shifts on the immigration issue.
Our analyses at the macro and micro levels employ the same selection rules for the inclusion of
mainstream and radical right parties, use identical codings for measures of party strategies, and
employ analogous strategies for testing the conditional effectiveness of accommodative strategies
and for the selection of control variables. For the measures of party strategies, we use data from
the MARPOR Project (Volkens et al., 2019) which provides parties’policy positions based on
their election manifestos. To derive immigration position scales, we combine items that capture
positive and negative mentions in the categories National Way of Life and Multiculturalism.The
most important advantage of these data is that they provide estimates of party policies cross-
nationally and for an extended time period. Furthermore, the comparability of our results is ensured
since these data were used in related studies (e.g., Meguid, 2008). Following the widely used proced-
ureintroducedinLowe(2011), we aggregate the MARPOR items using logit-transformed scales.
The association between mainstream parties’position shifts and RRP support might be influ-
enced by a number of conditioning factors. We consider various arguments suggesting that the
effectiveness of accommodative strategies depends on contextual factors through a series of inter-
action effects. First, Meguid’s(2008, 39, 51) work emphasizes that the effectiveness of positional
accommodation hinges on the radical right life cycle: Accommodation should be most effective
when radical right challengers first break through into the electoral arena and pose an initial elect-
oral threat, as mainstream parties can still exploit a valence advantage. We thus distinguish three
phases that capture the dynamics of electoral threat and valence competition: marginalization (little
to no electoral threat), breakthrough (initial electoral threat, initial valence asymmetry), and consoli-
dation (persistent electoral threat, open valence competition). Following Art (2011), we conceptu-
alize these phases in terms of electoral persistence: When the radical right gains at least five percent
of the national vote for the first time, it enters the breakthrough phase; when it does so for at least
three consecutive national elections, we consider it consolidated.
Second, radical right success has increasingly become a European-wide phenomenon (Mudde,
2019). We test whether the mainstreaming of radical right politics over time undermines the
effectiveness of accommodation akin to a linear time trend. Third, we test whether accommoda-
tion is more effective when combined with a cordon sanitaire, i.e., when mainstream parties sys-
tematically rule out cooperation with RRPs (see e.g., Art, 2011; van Spanje, 2018). In elections
with multiple RRPs, we focus on the largest RRP to determine whether a cordon sanitaire is
2
While people might not always correctly remember their vote choice, Abou-Chadi and Stoetzer (2020) show that changes
in parties’vote shares estimated from vote recall questions are highly correlated with their actual vote changes. Vote recall is
thus unlikely to be systematically biased.
Political Science Research and Methods 3
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

present, as it is arithmetically most important for prospective government formation and its
chances of joining government are likely most important in conditioning electoral responses to
mainstream party policy strategies.
Fourth, Meguid (2008) also underlines that the success of RRPs depends on the joint strategic
behavior of the mainstream parties in a party system. Thus, for each mainstream party in our
sample, we observe the range of policy positions among its mainstream competitors.
Depending on whether these competitors’positions are all restrictive, all liberal, or both, we
define a mainstream parties’competitive environment as restrictive, as liberal, or mixed. Fifth,
we separate proximate and non-proximate competitors to RRPs by subsetting our analyses to par-
ties of the mainstream left (social democrats) and mainstream right (conservatives, christian
democrats, and selected liberal parties). Sixth, extant work on party system agendas suggests
that parties must compete on issues that voters consider important (Green-Pedersen and
Mortensen, 2010). Accommodative strategies should thus be most effective when campaigns
revolve around the immigration issue. We test whether accommodative shifts are more effective
when immigration is a highly salient issue on the party system agenda. Lastly, Tavits (2007)
argues that policy shifts on value-laden issues tend to lack credibility. Following this rationale,
accommodative repositioning should only be effective if it remains consistent with parties’past
positions. For that reason, we condition accommodative shifts on parties’past positions.
We refer readers to the online Appendix for further information on data, measures, and mod-
els. Section A provides information on the electoral contexts and the selection of mainstream and
RRPs. Section B details the measurement of party positions, provides in-depth descriptions of the
moderators used for testing the conditional arguments, and describes all control variables.
Corresponding summary statistics are reported in Section C. We provide additional explanations
of the data structure and modeling choices in Section D. Regression tables can be found in
Section E. Robustness checks, along with additional analyses, are reported in Section F.
Findings
Figure 1 shows trends in radical right support akin to our two empirical approaches. Plot A, based on
108 election results, shows changes in macro-level radical right vote shares, 1976–2017. Plot B, based
on micro-level survey data, shows dyadic RRP net transfers with 228 mainstream parties competing
in 70 elections, 1987–2017. As we see in Plot A, RRPs have enjoyed average gains of 0.5–2 percentage
points per election since the mid-1980s. Plot B reflects this pattern. Since the late 1980s, RRPs have,
on average gained, 0.2–0.8 percentage points from each mainstream party. However, we also see con-
siderable deviations from these average trends, both at the aggregate-level and in dyadic competition
with mainstream competitors. We therefore turn to the questions if, and under which conditions,
mainstream party policy shifts on immigration predict these variations in gains and losses.
Table 1 shows the results of our analyses for the overall (i.e., unconditioned) effect. The first model
shows the marginal effect of mainstream parties’one unit shifts toward restrictive immigration posi-
tions on changes in radical right vote shares (in percentage points). For the micro-level findings, we
report the effects of a given mainstream party’s strategy on the percentage of voters that RRPs win
from and lose to it (models 3 and 4), as well as the net balance of this trade (model 2).
At the macro level, the marginal effect is close to zero and fails to reach conventional levels of
statistical significance. Hence, there is no support for the claim that accommodating radical right
positions weakens the radical right electorally. At the individual level, we gain a more nuanced
picture. The estimates show that accommodative shifts catalyze voter transfers between main-
stream parties and the radical right, predicting increases in both gains and losses of RRPs.
Crucially, however, we find that accommodative policy shifts tend to do more good than harm
to the radical right. The effect on gross radical right gains is pronouncedly positive, statistically
significant, and clearly outweighs the effect on the increase in losses in terms of magnitude. Even
though the overall net effect is statistically indistinguishable from zero, the findings thus show
4 Werner Krause et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

that rightward shifts on immigration result in significantly greater gains for RRPs and suggest
that mainstream parties that move toward the radical right’s core issue positions risk losing
more voters to the radical right than they win in return.
Next to this baseline specification, Figure 2 presents a series of alternative specifications that
scrutinize the conditional impact of accommodative strategies. The findings show a clear picture:
We find no significant effects at the 95 percent level on macro-level changes in the overall radical
right vote share (first column).
Turning to the micro-level analyses that show net voter transfers (column 2) as well as disaggre-
gated gross gains and losses (columns 3 and 4), we see some interesting insights into the patterns
underlying the remaining null results. In particular, they show several conditions under which we
can observe significant radical right gains as a result of mainstream party accommodation. Radical
right gross gains are particularly pronounced when mainstream parties compete with RRPs that
have become consolidated players in the electoral arena (spec. 4). In addition, we find that accommo-
dative shifts have become increasingly ineffective over time, resulting in a significantly positive effect
on net voter transfers to RRPs by the 2010s (spec. 7). These two findings suggest that accommodative
strategies can benefit RRPs if they are more established players in their respective political arena.
Second and in contrast to previous findings presented in van Spanje (2018), the combination of
accommodation with a cordon sanitaire does not play in mainstream parties’favor: Accommodation
Fig. 1. Trends in radical right gains/losses over time. (A) Changes in vote shares. (B) Survey-based radical right net trans-
fers per mainstream party in a given election.
Table 1. Reduced-form regression tables showing the effect of mainstream party policy shifts on various outcomes
ΔRRP vote shares RRP net transfers RRP gross gains RRP gross losses
ΔPosition 0.04 [ −0.30, 0.37] 0.04 [ −0.04, 0.13] 0.08 [0.01, 0.15] 0.04 [ −0.00, 0.09]
Country FE √
Election SE √
σ
parties×elections
0.0068 0.0055 0.0042
σ
countries
0.0041 0.0042 0.0000
σ
elections
0.0040 0.0054 0.0028
σ
residual
0.1198 0.0946 0.0726
N
countries
13 13 13 13
N
elections
108 70 70 70
N
parties×elections
351 228 228 228
N
individuals
144 545 144 545 144 545
N
parties×individuals
468 539 468 539 468 539
Model 1: OLS with country fixed-effects and election-clustered standard errors. Models 2–4: hierarchical linear models with varying intercepts
for countries, elections, and party-elections.
Political Science Research and Methods 5
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

is more effective in winning voters from the radical right in the absence of a cordon sanitaire and
predicts greater losses to the radical right when employed in combination with a cordon sanitaire
(specs. 8 + 9).
Lastly, the results suggest that too much co-optation of the radical right leads to gains for these
challengers. On the one hand, where other mainstream parties already occupy restrictive immigration
positions, RRPs gain strongly from parties that choose to accommodate (spec. 12). On the other
hand, accommodative strategies predict higher radical right gains and losseswhenemployedbypar-
ties that had previously assumed restrictive positions on these issues (specs. 18–20). This suggests that
vote switching in response to mainstream party policy shifts is most pronounced in the competition
of RRPs and mainstream parties with a hard-line stance on immigration. Again, we see that the
effects on gains outweigh the effects on losses. Accommodating radical right issue positions does
thus not benefit mainstream parties even if they can claim to toughen a stance that they previously
advocated. In contrast, voters defect from these parties to the radical right in remarkable numbers.
Robustness checks
We subject our analyses to an extensive set of robustness checks. First, in Section B.1 of the online
Appendix, we use three alternative measures for parties’policy strategies, including the manifesto
codings by Dancygier and Margalit (2020), which explicitly focus on immigration. Second, we
re-estimate our macro-level analyses using jackknife resampling at the country and the election
level. Third, as our micro-level analyses use a smaller sample than our macro-level analyses
for reasons of data availability, we re-estimate our macro-level analyses on the exact same subset
of elections and parties as the micro-level analyses. Fourth, one factor potentially affecting the
interpretation of our results is public opinion. It is possible that both our variables of interest
—RRP vote shares and mainstream parties’shifts—are simultaneously driven by shifts in voters’
preferences on the immigration issue. We examined the robustness of our results, while control-
ling for changes in public preferences toward immigration.
3
Fifth, we present analyses if only the
electorally strongest RRP is considered instead of aggregating all relevant RRPs. Lastly, we also
Fig. 2. Alternative specifications—marginal effects with 95 percent confidence intervals.
3
Due to limited data availability, this test is restricted to elections between 1989 and 2017.
6 Werner Krause et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

provide a more direct test of our macro-level analysis because the stacked structure of our data
potentially obscures effects driven by shifts of entire party systems. We do so by estimating the
effect of the average response of all mainstream parties on RRPs’electoral support.
These robustness checks, reported in Section F of the online Appendix, strongly support our
point that accommodative strategies fail to prevent, stop, or revert the rise of radical right parties.
To the contrary, several specifications suggest that co-opting the radical right’s core issue posi-
tions tends to benefit them electorally. While few findings are robust across all specifications,
we find repeated evidence at the micro-level that RRPs win voters from mainstream parties fol-
lowing accommodation when they are consolidated competitors and when mainstream parties
simultaneously employ a cordon sanitaire.
Across all robustness checks, we find in fact only one specification, focusing on marginal RRPs
prior to their electoral breakthrough, which yields a signficantly negative, albeit substantively
small, effect. This specification strongly resembles Meguid’s(2005,2008) analysis in terms of
sample and measures and thus seemingly corroborates her original findings. However, this find-
ing is neither supported by the corresponding micro-level analysis nor by any of the other macro-
level variants of the same scenario. It thus seems that our only negative finding is driven by a
particular combination of sample and measure—and not indicative of the conditional effective-
ness of positional accommodation of emergent RRPs.
Conclusion
In this research note, we investigate one of the core questions within the research on radical right
success: Do accommodative strategies help to weaken RRPs electorally? Our analyses do not pro-
vide any evidence that adopting more anti-immigrant positions reduces the radical right’s sup-
port. Combining macro- and micro-level evidence, we can demonstrate that this does not
mean that voters are generally unresponsive to party repositioning. To the contrary, accommo-
dative policy shifts by mainstream parties tend to catalyze voter transfers between mainstream
parties and RRPs. While some of these transitions cancel out in aggregation, the radical right,
if anything, seems to be the net beneficiary of this exchange.
Our findings have important implications for the literature on party competition and RRPs in
particular. The idea that accommodation helps to reduce niche party success has become a work-
ing assumption in many other studies. This is especially the case in research on mainstream party
reactions to niche party success. However, the findings of our article open up a puzzle. While it is
well-documented that mainstream parties react to radical right success by shifting toward their
policy position (van Spanje, 2010; Han, 2015; Abou-Chadi, 2016; Abou-Chadi and Krause,
2020), these strategies do not seem to pay off electorally. Future work focusing on intra-party
dynamics and competition between mainstream parties should explore this discrepancy further.
4
As a note of caution, the associational character of our study is unable to rule out potential
endogeneity. While this problem is common to comparative research on parties’position shifts
and vote choice, our study complements recent experimental work on the consequences of
accommodative strategies that focus on isolated electoral contexts (Hjorth and Larsen, 2020;
Chou et al., 2021). On a broad comparative basis, our findings substantiate these studies by indi-
cating that accommodative strategies will not pay off for mainstream parties. Nevertheless, future
research should address this topic further with research designs suitable for causally identifying
the effects of party strategies on voter behavior across different political contexts. One related
point is to extend our analyses to multiple issues. Future research should also take into account
that party system dynamics are inherently inter-related. Research should thus take up the concep-
tual and methodological challenge for an encompassing approach to vote switching between par-
ties and patterns of voter mobilization and abstention.
4
See Krause (2020) for a related finding concerning the radical left.
Political Science Research and Methods 7
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press

In addition, our research can inform the current broader debate about the success of RRPs in
Europe. Commentators and politicians alike often seem to be convinced that (a) the success of
the radical right is a consequence of too centrist positions of mainstream parties and that (b)
more anti-immigrant positions especially from mainstream right parties should help to weaken
the radical right again. Our study provides support for neither of these claims. On the contrary,
our findings suggest that, if anything, accommodative strategies of mainstream parties strengthen
the radical right. This is supplemented by the finding that mainstream parties do not seem to
benefit from accommodative strategies. There is no effect for either the mainstream right or
the mainstream left in terms of their voter support, according to our analyses. When mainstream
parties pick up radical right issues, they rather run the risk of legitimizing and normalizing radical
right discourse and strengthening the radical right in the long run.
Supplementary material. The supplementary material for this article can be found at https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8.
To obtain replication material for this article, please visit: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/GBWB8I
References
Abou-Chadi T (2016) Niche party success and mainstream party policy shifts—how green and radical right parties differ in
their impact. British Journal of Political Science 46, 417–436.
Abou-Chadi T and Krause W (2020) The causal effect of radical right success on mainstream parties’policy positions.
A regression discontinuity approach. British Journal of Political Science 50, 829–847.
Abou-Chadi T and Stoetzer LF (2020) How parties react to voter transitions. American Political Science Review 114, 940–945.
Art D (2011) Inside the Radical Right: The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Arzheimer K and Carter E (2006) Political opportunity structures and right-wing extremist party success. European Journal
of Political Research 45, 419–443.
Chou W, Dancygier R, Egami N and Jamal AA (2021) Competing for loyalists? How party positioning affects populist rad-
ical right voting. Comparative Political Studies 54, 2226–2260.
Dahlström C and Sundell A (2012) A losing gamble. How mainstream parties facilitate anti-immigrant party success.
Electoral Studies 31, 353–363.
Dancygier R and Margalit Y (2020) The evolution of the immigration debate: evidence from a new dataset of party positions
over the last half-century. Comparative Political Studies 53, 734–774.
Green-Pedersen C and Mortensen PB (2010) Who sets the agenda and who responds to it in the Danish parliament? A new
model of issue competition and agenda-setting. European Journal of Political Research 49, 257–281.
Han KJ (2015) The impact of radical right-wing parties on the positions of mainstream parties regarding multiculturalism.
West European Politics 38, 557–576.
Hjorth F and Larsen MV (2020) When does accommodation work? Electoral effects of mainstream left position taking on
immigration. British Journal of Political Science 1–9. Online First.
Krause W (2020) Appearing moderate or radical? Radical left party success and the two-dimensional political space. West
European Politics 43, 1365–1387.
Lowe W, Benoit K, Slava M and Laver M (2011) Scaling policy preferences from coded political texts. Legislative Studies
Quarterly 36, 123–155.
Meguid BM (2005) Competition between unequals: the role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success. American
Political Science Review 99, 347–359.
Meguid BM (2008) Party Competition Between Unequals. Strategies and Electoral Fortunes in Western Europe. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Mudde C (2019) The Far Right Today. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tavits M (2007) Principle vs. pragmatism: policy shifts and political competition. American Journal of Political Science 51,151–165.
van Spanje J (2010) Contagious parties: anti-immigration parties and their impact on other parties’immigration stances in
contemporary Western Europe. Party Politics 16, 563–586.
van Spanje J (2018) Controlling the Electoral Marketplace. How Established Parties Ward Off Competition. Cham: Palgrave
MacMillan.
Volkens A, Krause W, Lehmann P, Matthieß T, Merz N, Regel S and Weßels B (2019) The Manifesto Data Collection.
Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2019a. https://doi.org/10.25522/manifesto.mpds.2019a.
Cite this article: Krause W, Cohen D, Abou-Chadi T (2022). Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and
the success of radical right parties. Political Science Research and Methods 1–8. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8
8 Werner Krause et al.
https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2022.8 Published online by Cambridge University Press