‘Fix the system!’ Variations of anti-establishment normalisation strategies in comparative perspective
| Published date | 01 November 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221089219 |
| Author | Bartek Pytlas |
| Date | 01 November 2024 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957221089219
Politics
2024, Vol. 44(4) 650 –669
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/02633957221089219
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
‘Fix the system!’ Variations
of anti-establishment
normalisation strategies in
comparative perspective
Bartek Pytlas
LMU Munich, Germany
Abstract
This article explores how different anti-establishment parties (AEPs) can themselves strategically
enact an image of both distinctiveness and ‘normality’ behind their political offer. For this purpose,
we directly measure and map diverse anti-establishment normalisation strategies by analysing 142
social media campaigns of radical right, left, and ‘centrist’ AEPs and their conventional competitors
during 23 elections in Europe during 2010–2019. We find that while AEPs presented themselves
as fundamentally distinct from ‘politics as usual’, they simultaneously attempted to normalise their
contestation supply across and within two dimensions: mainstreaming and streamlining. Using
regression analysis, we further find that the degree to which AEPs rhetorically normalised their
supply was positively and significantly associated with their broader electoral appeal ceteris paribus,
controlling for substantive issue positions, parliamentary experience and position in government.
Concurrently, the effects of particular normalisation strategies and their specific calibration varied
for the radical right and left. The findings deepen our comparative understanding of diverse anti-
establishment strategies used in party competition.
Keywords
anti-establishment politics, electoral campaigning, mainstreaming, normalisation strategies, radical
politics
Received: 27th May 2021; Revised version received: 16th February 2022; Accepted: 23rd February 2022
Introduction
In the past decade, anti-establishment parties (AEPs) which fundamentally contest
‘politics as usual’ (Barr, 2009) have themselves become a usual sight. Across Europe,
anti-establishment thrust came from newer and older, less or more systemically integrated
actors from the radical right, left, as well as other AEPs often termed as ‘centrist’ due to
Corresponding author:
Bartek Pytlas, Geschwister Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, Oettingenstr. 67, 80538
München, Germany.
Email: bartek.pytlas@gsi.lmu.de
1089219POL0010.1177/02633957221089219PoliticsPytlas
research-article2022
Article
Pytlas 651
their relatively moderate or eclectic thick ideologies (Hanley and Sikk, 2016; Engler
et al., 2019; Zulianello, 2018, 2020). Previous research has provided us with rich findings
on diverse characteristics of AEPs. Yet we still have relatively few comparative insights
that directly assess different entrepreneurial strategies behind anti-establishment politics,
especially the use of normalising rhetoric.
Anti-establishment politics plays an important role in party competition. AEPs have
been shown to benefit from politicising new issues or positions fundamentally distinct
from those of their conventional competitors (De Vries and Hobolt, 2012). Concurrently,
parties using anti-establishment politics do not necessarily justify their distinctive supply,
or political offer, as explicitly fringe and incompatible with the mainstream consensus.
Similar to many and varied ‘anti-establishment reform parties’ in Central and Eastern
Europe (CEE) (Hanley and Sikk, 2016), actors such as Ciudadanos in Spain or La
République en Marche (LaREM) in France contested the political class by calling to fun-
damentally ‘fix’ rather than to overturn normal politics. But also radical parties can use
different persuasive messages to associate their supply with already established ideolo-
gies or justify it as truly representing current mainstream principles – without necessarily
moderating their substantive positions (Akkerman et al., 2016; Art, 2007; Froio, 2018;
Mudde, 2010).
We argue that to better understand the role of anti-establishment politics in party com-
petition, we need to explore how different AEPs themselves strategically shape an image
of both distinctiveness and normality behind their political offer. Normalising cues, in
addition to accommodative tactics by conventional parties, are seen as crucial for the abil-
ity of particularly radical right actors to increase their perceived legitimacy and credibil-
ity, shaping their potential for broader mobilisation (Bos and van der Brug, 2010; Froio,
2018; Halikiopoulou et al., 2013). Yet by increasingly portraying themselves as closer to
normal politics, some AEPs concurrently risk weakening their distinctive appeal and
increasing internal conflicts (Froio, 2018; March and Keith, 2016). It is thus interesting to
observe how different AEP types navigate their contestation profiles, particularly as the
diverse ways by which AEPs shape and combine their strategies have rarely been directly
measured and evaluated in more long-term comparative perspective.
In this article we aim to comparatively explore the diversity of anti-establishment nor-
malisation strategies and analyse how different AEP types use them in practice. We argue
that for these purposes it is useful to assess how AEPs rhetorically calibrate their appeals
as both distinctive and ‘normal’. Departing from previous research on diverse contesta-
tion formulas (Lucardie, 2000; Pytlas, 2021; Sikk, 2012), we measure these strategies
directly by analysing 142 social media campaigns of AEPs from the radical right, left, and
‘centre’, as well as conventional parties during 23 elections in eight European countries
(Austria, Czechia, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Spain) during 2010–2019.
Rather than assessing normalising strategies unidimensionally, we map this communi-
cation by observing the degree to which AEPs rhetorically operated across and within two
sub-dimensions of normalisation: streamlining (polarising not from ‘new’ niches, but
around already operative ‘old’ ideas and groups associated with traditional elite politics)
and mainstreaming (polarising not around mainstream principles themselves, but around
how they are currently practised). While streamlining cues spotlight broader credibility of
AEPs as plausible, serious, and respectable political contenders, mainstreaming rhetoric
emphasises broader legitimacy or acceptability of AEP offer as compatible with overarch-
ing principles guiding mainstream politics. Second, we apply these continuous measures
in ordinary least squares (OLS) regression to test whether different AEPs which engaged
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