Abstract/Summary

This paper focuses on the impact of the Golden Dawn on the dynamics of domestic party competition by examining whether there has been a change in issue salience since the party’s dramatic rise. Our main goal is to examine the salience of topics in the Golden Dawn’s agenda from a comparative perspective vis-à-vis the other actors in the system, in order to identify whether attention on particular issues has shifted. We proceed with an analysis of programmatic and ideological materials produced by the Golden Dawn and its competitor parties, including election manifestos and public speeches. We analyse these documents through the employment of a comprehensive framework for coding policy agendas provided by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). We find no direct effect on the salience of the immigration issue. However, there is a rise of nationalism across the party system.