11:20 - 13:00
P2
Room: Club D
Panel Session 2
Maiken Røed - Party Recognition of Interest Groups in the European Parliament, 1999-2019
Markus Kollberg - Challenging the Establishment from Within: Analysing Challenger Party Strategies in the Parliamentary Arena
Sofia Vasilopoulou - Are populist MEPs the 'voice of the people'? An analysis of MEP-citizen opinion congruence in the European Parliament (1999-2015)
Challenging the Establishment from Within: Analysing Challenger Party Strategies in the Parliamentary Arena
P2-01
Presented by: Markus Kollberg
Markus Kollberg
PhD Candidate - University College London

Challenger parties in Europe are on the rise. Previous scholarly work is primarily concerned with how challenger parties get elected but overlooked the consequences of their success for democratic institutions. This is a serious shortcoming because challenger parties’ strategies within institutions – especially, in parliament – matter for democratic deliberation and representation. This article analyses how the policy and rhetorical strategies of challenger parties play out in the parliamentary arena. It argues that parliamentarians’ incentives regarding rhetorical choices differ systematically depending on their status as members of challenger or dominant parties. Whilst the latter need to balance policy-, office-, and vote-seeking strategies, the former’s primary goal is to maximize electoral success. This makes challenger party parliamentarians engage in anti-establishment rhetoric and issue entrepreneurship conditionally on the expected electoral returns. The analysis tests this argument on a new dataset of speeches given in the European Parliament between 1999 and 2017. The article develops a novel measure of anti-establishment rhetoric and issue-entrepreneurship in parliamentary debates combining word embeddings and dictionaries. It also innovatively links this measure to public opinion and expert survey data. By highlighting the situational and strategic element of challenger parties’ communication, this article makes an important contribution because it improves the understanding of challenger party success and its consequences for democratic, legislative institutions.