Party Competition in Times of Crisis

In many Western democracies, the dynamics of party competition have changed in response to changing electorates. New ‘challenger parties’ have acted as political entrepreneurs increasing the salience of policy issues ‘that can drive a wedge between coalitions of and within dominant parties’ and using ‘antiestablishment rhetoric to weaken the competence advantage of established parties’ (Hobolt and de Vries 2020: 5). In this paper we contribute to existing literature by investigating the strategies of challenger parties in times of severe policy crises. Using quantitative text analyses and qualitative content analysis of legislative speeches held during the Covid-19 pandemic in France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, and Israel (2020-2022) we investigate how challenger parties contributed to the polarization of political debates and how both mainstream and challenger parties have framed the crisis to gain advantages in political competition. Existing theoretical work suggests that mainstream parties tend to highlight their policy experience and (in the case of government parties) exploit rally-around-the-flag dynamics (Brody and Shapiro 1989). Challenger parties act as issue entrepreneurs and focus their parliamentary work on wedging issues that are likely to weaken mainstream parties, or coalitions of mainstream parties, in the legislative chamber (de Vries and Hobolt 2020). The legislatures of the countries we selected experienced the rise of new right-wing populist challenger parties (Germany and Israel), established but re-positioned parties on the extreme right (France), factions of an established mainstream party increasingly using the strategies of challenger parties (Britain), a left-wing challenger party seeking to break the oligopoly of two center-right mainstream parties (Ireland). Empirically, we first identify all COVID-19 related debates and subsequently apply the Wordfish algorithm to estimate the position of legislators (Slapin and Proksch 2008). We start with a descriptive analysis of how polarization in debates developed over time. In a second step, we will use content analysis of selected debates to describe the way arguments were framed in legislative debates by both mainstream government parties, mainstream opposition parties and challenger parties. Our research will shed light on how challenger parties’ strategies in times of crisis are influenced by the positioning of other parties, and how these strategies impact the polarization of parliaments. This is relevant to our general understanding of how parliaments function in times of crisis when challenger parties are present.