15:30 - 17:45
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Jan Stuckatz
Discussant/s:
Silvana Tarlea
Meeting Room A

Tanja Schweinberger
Mass public opinions towards trade balances: Mercantilism 2.0

Sofia Vasilopoulou, Dan Keith, Liisa Talving
Emerging divisions on trade in post-Brexit UK

Lee Jieun, Jan Stuckatz
Comparing Mobilization and Access: USMCA Lobbying in the U.S. and Canada

Alex Honeker
Populist Right Success and Mainstream Party Adaptation: The Case of Free Trade
Populist Right Success and Mainstream Party Adaptation: The Case of Free Trade
Alex Honeker
University of Pittsburgh

Are populist right parties making mainstream parties more economically protectionist? From West to East, European parties of the populist right are experiencing increasing electoral success by running on platforms stressing cultural an economic protectionism. While previous studies have found a causal link between populist right success and mainstream parties’ shifts on immigration and multiculturalism, an unexplored topic is the degree to which populist right success is causing mainstream parties to become more lukewarm in their support for trade liberalization and economic globalization. By imbuing the issue of trade with the symbolic power of nationalism, populist right parties can transform trade into an “easy” issue for voters, causing mainstream parties to avoid the politicization of trade by deemphasizing it from their campaign statements. In this paper, I test this deemphasis hypothesis by conducting a quantitative text analysis of mainstream parties' campaign rhetoric from 1990 to 2020, covering 21 European democracies.