The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School THE RADICAL RIGHT IN PARLIAMENT: A NEW METHOD AND APPLICATION FOR STUDYING POLITICAL TEXT IN MULTIPLE LANGUAGES A Dissertation in Political Science by Mitchell Goist Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2020 ii The dissertation of Mitchell Goist was reviewed and approved* by the following: Burt L. Monroe Liberal Arts Professor of Political Science Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee Bruce Desmarais Associate Professor of Political Science Matt Golder Professor of Political Science Sarah Rajtmajer Assistant Professor of Information Science and Tecnology Glenn Palmer Professor of Political Science and Director of Graduate Studies iii ABSTRACT Since a new wave of radical right support in the early 1980s, scholars have sought to understand the motivations and programmatic appeals of far-right parties. However, due to their small size and dearth of data, existing methodological approaches were did not allow the direct study of these parties’ behavior in parliament. Using a collection of parliamentary speeches from the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and the Czech Re- public, Chapter 1 of this dissertation addresses this problem by developing a new model for the study of political text in multiple languages. Using this new method allows the construction of a shared issue space where each party is embedded regardless of the language spoken in the speech or the country of origin. Chapter 2 builds on this new method by explicating the ideolog- ical appeals of radical right parties. It finds that in some instances radical right parties behave similarly to mainstream, center-right parties, but distinguish themselves by a focus on individual crime and an emphasis on negative rhetorical frames. The chapter further illustrates how radical right populist appeals differ from leftist populist appeals, through the latter’s emphasis on ma- terial deprivation. Finally, Chapter 3 shows how mainstream parties react to increases in radical right support, finding that they engage in rhetorical concessions, attempting to mimic the radical right’s rhetoric while granting fewer substantive concessions. This chapter provides evidence for a ”coarsening” of debate that can arise after radical right entry into parliament. iv Contents List of Figures vii List of Tables x 1 Introduction 1 2 Analysis of Political Texts in Multiple Languages 5 2.1 Introduction . .5 2.2 Background . .6 2.3 A multilingual text analytics pipeline . .8 2.3.1 Modeling topical semantics with word embeddings . .9 2.3.2 Aligning vector space across languages with Procrustes analysis . 11 2.3.3 Interpretable embeddings with decomposition and rotation . 14 2.3.4 Document scoring . 16 2.4 Parliamentary speech data and preprocessing . 19 2.5 Validity . 20 2.5.1 Content validity of cross-lingual topics . 20 2.5.2 Validity of linear political semantics . 30 2.6 Common Space Understandings of Political Competition . 33 2.6.1 What is the shared landscape of interparty competition? . 33 2.6.2 Can this improve existing understandings of party families? . 35 2.7 Conclusion . 40 v 3 The Radical Right in Parliament: Anti–immigration, Authoritarianism, and Pop- ulism 42 3.1 Introduction . 42 3.2 Literature Review and Research Questions . 45 3.2.1 Contributions and Research Design . 48 3.3 Methodological Approach . 50 3.3.1 ICA vs. SVD . 52 3.4 Immigration . 54 3.4.1 Immigration ............................. 55 3.4.2 Religion ................................ 63 3.5 Authoritarianism . 69 3.5.1 Crime .................................. 70 3.5.2 Public Health ............................ 76 3.6 Populism . 82 3.6.1 Europe ................................. 83 3.6.2 Rhetorical Strategies . 89 3.7 Conclusion and Future Research . 95 4 The Radical Right in Competition 97 4.1 Issue entrepreneurs and responses from mainstream parties . 97 4.1.1 Theoretical expectations . 101 4.2 Issue attention and ownership . 107 4.3 Impact of radical right parties . 113 4.3.1 All parties . 114 4.3.2 Disaggregated Effects . 116 4.4 Conclusion . 123 Bibliography 125 Appendices 141 vi A Chapter 2 142 A.1 Substantive Keywords . 142 A.2 Rhetorical keywords . 153 B Chapter 3 162 B.1 Attention to subtopics over time . 162 B.1.1 Immigration ............................. 162 B.1.2 Religion ................................ 167 B.1.3 Crime .................................. 173 B.1.4 Public Health ............................ 179 B.1.5 Europe ................................. 184 C Chapter 4 189 C.1 Government / Opposition, all parties . 189 C.2 Liberals and Christian Democrats . 189 vii List of Figures 1.1 Master Legend for Party Graphics . .4 2.1 Procrustes alignment using polysemic bilingual dictionaries. 13 2.2 Rotation of embeddings to simple structure. 17 2.3 Attention to Energy over time . 25 2.4 Attention to Inequality over time . 26 2.5 Attention to Business over time . 27 2.6 Attention to #Failure over time . 28 2.7 Dimensions of weighted SVD of topic space by party . 34 2.8 Assessing the fidelity and clarity of party family memberships . 36 2.9 Varimax rotation of substantive and rhetorical topics . 39 3.1 Scores for Asylum over time for each country . 58 3.2 Attention to Vulnerable Groups within the Immigration topic . 60 3.3 Immigration scaling . 62 3.4 Attention to Immigration within the Religion topic . 65 3.5 Attention to Christianity within the Religion topic . 67 3.6 Religion scaling . 68 3.7 Attention to Prison within the Crime topic . 72 3.8 Attention to Offences within the Crime topic . 74 3.9 Crime scaling . 75 3.10 Attention to Crime within the Public Health topic . 79 3.11 Public Health scaling . 81 viii 3.12 Attention to Others within the EU topic . 85 3.13 Attention to New Members within the EU topic . 87 3.14 EU scaling . 88 3.15 Failure scaling . 91 3.16 Nonsense scaling . 93 3.17 Representation scaling . 94 4.1 Oppositional topics: capitol ∼ labor . 104 4.2 Oppositional topics: immigration ∼ environment . 105 4.3 Relative attention for Nationalist parties compared to others . 108 4.4 Issue attention by party family, mainstream parties . 111 4.5 Issue attention by party family, challenger parties . 112 4.6 Attention to topics for mainstream parties by presence of radical–right parties . 115 4.7 Relative attention to topics, by radical–right seated . 116 4.8 Relative attention to topics, by radical–right seated (Liberal and Christian Demo- crat) . 118 4.9 Relative attention to topics, by radical–right seated (Leftist and Ecological) . 119 4.10 Relative attention to topics, by radical–right seated (Social–Democrats / Oppo- sition — Government) . 121 4.11 Relative attention to topics, by radical–right seated (Conservatives / Opposition — Government) . 122 B.1 Attention to Internally Displaced Persons over time . 163 B.2 Attention to Applications over time . 164 B.3 Attention to Terrorism over time . 165 B.4 Attention to EU over time . 166 B.5 Attention to Charity over time . 168 B.6 Attention to Charity over time . 169 B.7 Attention to Violence over time . 170 B.8 Attention to Gender over time . 171 B.9 Attention to Schools over time . 172 ix B.10 Attention to Courts over time . 174 B.11 Attention to Rights over time . 175 B.12 Attention to Police over time . 176 B.13 Attention to Prison over time . 177 B.14 Attention to Political Violence over time . 178 B.15 Attention to Alcohol over time . 180 B.16 Attention to Animals over time . 181 B.17 Attention to Children over time . 182 B.18 Attention to Consumers over time . 183 B.19 Attention to Markets over time . 185 B.20 Attention to Eurozone over time . 186 B.21 Attention to NATO over time . 187 B.22 Attention to Threats over time . 188 C.1 Relative attention to topics for government and opposition, by radical right seated 190 C.2 Relative attention to topics for Liberals and Christian Democrats, by radical right seated . 191 C.3 Relative attention to topics for Christian Democrats, by radical right seated, dis- aggregated by opposition status . 192 C.4 Relative attention to topics for Christian Democrats, by radical right seated, dis- aggregated by opposition status . 193 x List of Tables 2.1 Embeddings under different context windows. 12 2.2 Corpus meta-data . ..