Affective Polarisation of Parties? Centre-Right Strategies Towards Radical-Right Populism and Their Effect on Emotional Rejection Among Mainstream Parties

While scholarly debate has extensively addressed the ideological polarisation of party systems, research on affective polarisation has so far focused almost exclusively on citizens’ attitudes towards political parties and/or their supporters. This is problematic for at least two reasons. First, political parties are ultimately associations of citizens, which raises the question of whether similar processes also occur at the level of party elites. Second, previous studies have demonstrated a link between ideological polarisation in party systems and affective polarisation among citizens. It remains unclear, however, whether this relationship is driven solely by ideological differences between parties or whether it is also shaped by increasing emotional conflict among political elites. This paper therefore shifts the debate on affective polarisation to the party level. Building on research that links both ideological and affective polarisation to the electoral success of radical-right populist parties (RRPPs), it examines the effect of the latter’s electoral success on emotional rejection and distrust between centre-left and centre-right mainstream parties. It is argued that the magnitude of this effect is driven, among other factors, by centre-right parties’ strategic responses to RRPP success—specifically, the extent of their cooperation with and programmatic accommodation of RRPPs. The argument is evaluated through a qualitative cross-temporal and -country analysis of selected budgetary parliamentary debates between 1998 and 2025 in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. These cases provide both within- and between-case variation in the electoral success of RRPPs as well as in centre-right parties’ strategic responses. Plenary debate data are supplemented with semi-structured expert interviews with party representatives.