Material impact declined post-2024 (2.78→2.43, M>=4 share 23.7%→11.3%).
Right-wing strategic moderation: more motions, milder content, better
framing. The Overton window did not expand — right-wing proposals
shifted into the existing window. 'Acceptance through moderation'
replaces 'acceptance without conversion.'
| SVD cultural gap (centrist−right) | 0.282 | 0.428 | +0.146 | **Diverged** |
Centrist support surged. Centrist parties moved *left* spatially while voting *more* with right-wing motions. Content extremity did not increase — but the extremity measure conflates stylistic and material dimensions, and material impact consistently exceeds stylistic extremity by 0.83 points. The framework that best explains these apparently contradictory signals is **acceptance without conversion**: the boundary of acceptable policy widened, but party positions did not converge.
Centrist support surged. Centrist parties moved *left* spatially while voting *more* with right-wing motions. But the motions themselves became *less* materially impactful — the share of high-impact proposals (M≥4) dropped from 23.7% to 11.3% and continued falling through 2026 (2.7%). The Overton window did **not** shift rightward. Instead, right-wing parties shifted their strategy toward the window: they filed more motions, with milder content, framed in centrist-friendly language. The center rewarded the framing without moving.
This is **acceptance through moderation**, not acceptance through conversion. Right-wing influence grew by becoming more centrist-compatible, not by making centrists more right-wing.
---
@ -44,6 +47,8 @@ Using chained Procrustes orthogonal rotation followed by global PCA on stacked v
This is spatial *divergence*, not convergence. Centrist parties did not become right-wing — they became marginally *more* left-wing in their overall voting patterns. The centrist center of gravity moved at 160 degrees in the 2D compass (southwest quadrant, toward welfare and cosmopolitanism), while right-wing parties moved further into the nationalist corner.
**Why this makes sense with the material impact data:** The SVD captures the *full* voting landscape — including all motions, not just the ones centrists supported. Right-wing parties continued filing high-impact motions that centrists opposed, while simultaneously filing a much larger volume of milder motions centrists supported. The net effect on SVD was centrist-left divergence: the extreme motions (still opposed by centrists) dominated the voting structure, while the surge of milder centrist-supported motions added volume without shifting party positions.
The tension between greater voting support and greater ideological distance is the puzzle that the mechanism analysis resolves.
**An important caveat:** SVD spatial positions capture *voting patterns*, not motion content or stated ideology. The finding that centrists moved left on the SVD axes means centrist parties' voting patterns became more distinct from right-wing voting patterns — it does not tell us whether the motions themselves became more right-wing or left-wing in content. A right-wing motion can score as "far right" on SVD because right-wing parties voted uniformly for it and left-wing parties uniformly against it, while the motion's textual content may be moderate. Conversely, a motion on a topic centrists and right-wing parties agree on (e.g., defense spending, nuclear energy) would show little spatial separation regardless of how radical the motion text is. SVD measures agreement structure, not policy positions. The "acceptance without conversion" framework is therefore a claim about *voting behavior*, not about party manifestos or deputies' stated beliefs.
@ -89,23 +94,30 @@ Critically, only one motion among the 24 involved targeted rights restriction, a
## The Overton Window Verdict
The evidence supports a clear conclusion: **the Overton window has widened, but it has not shifted rightward in the sense of converging party positions.**
**The Overton window did not shift right. Right-wing parties moderated toward it.**
What changed post-2024 was not what centrists found acceptable — it was what right-wing parties chose to propose:
1. **Motion volume surged, impact declined.** Right-wing motions doubled in volume post-2024, but became measurably milder. Material impact fell from 2.78 to 2.43 (Cohen's d = −0.36). The share of M≥4 proposals dropped from 23.7% to 11.3% and continued falling through 2026 (2.7%). Right-wing parties filed more motions, but the high-impact proposals that define their ideological core actually declined in absolute terms (430 pre-2024 → 116 post-2024).
2. **Centrists did not become more tolerant.** The extremity-stratified centrist support gradient persists — centrists still differentiate between mild and extreme motions post-2024. The across-the-board +0.25 baseline shift reflects that *the content within each bucket became milder on average*, not that centrists lowered their standards.
The window — the range of policies considered politically acceptable to support — has expanded. Right-wing motions that would have been unsupportable for centrist parties before 2024 now routinely gain their votes. This widening is asymmetric: centrists accept more right-wing policies, not the reverse. Left-wing support for right-wing motions actually declined from 26.8% to 20.2% post-2024, suggesting the left consolidated its opposition rather than joining the acceptance trend.
3. **The mechanism is strategic moderation.** The mechanism analysis found zero system-dismantling proposals and one targeted restriction among the 24 highest-centrist-support motions. The dominant pathways — consensus framing (33%), institutional language (21%), welfare expansion (17%) — show right-wing parties learned which frames work. They stopped proposing the most extreme ideas and started proposing centrist-compatible ones.
But party positions did not converge. The SVD data shows centrists moving left while right-wing parties moved further right culturally. The mechanism analysis shows that right-wing motions gain centrist support through repackaging — consensus framing, institutional language, welfare appeals — not through ideological conversion. Centrists are supporting motions that use their vocabulary, not adopting the policy substance those motions encode.
4. **SVD divergence confirms this interpretation.** Centrists moved left spatially because the remaining high-impact motions (still opposed by centrists) dominated the voting structure, while the surge of milder centrist-supported motions added volume without shifting party positions. The voting structure polarized on the extreme tail even as cooperation grew on the moderate mass.
This is **acceptance without conversion** — the defining signature of an Overton window shift. The window widened (more policies became acceptable to more parties) without parties changing their underlying positions. The mechanism is framing, not ideology.
This is **acceptance through moderation**, not acceptance through conversion. The Overton window — the range of politically acceptable policy — did not expand rightward. Rather, right-wing parties shifted their proposals *into* the existing window. The supply of right-wing policy changed (more motions, milder content, better framing), not the demand for it (what centrists accept).
### Uncertainty Hierarchy
| Level | Finding | Status |
|-------|---------|--------|
| **Strong** | Centrist voting support for right-wing motions surged post-2024 (d = +0.65 strict, d = +0.85 opposition-only) | Confirmed |
| **Moderate** | Migration-specificity of the shift | Confirmed (large domain effect, but non-migration also shows modest increase) |
| **Moderate** | Dominant mechanisms: consensus framing and institutional language | Based on n = 24 motions; classification is qualitative |
| **Inconclusive** | Content extremity trend | Flat trend may be artifact of language-sensitive scoring; 2D rescoring (n = 2,850) not yet analyzed temporally |
| **Strong** | Centrist voting support surged (d = +0.65 strict, d = +0.85 opposition-only) | Confirmed |
| **Strong** | Material impact of right-wing motions *declined* post-2024 (2.78→2.43, M≥4 share: 23.7%→11.3%) | Confirmed on n=2,850 |
| **Strong** | SVD spatial divergence — centrists moved left, right moved further right | Confirmed |
| **Moderate** | Strategic moderation: right-wing increased volume of milder proposals | Supported by material impact trend + mechanism analysis |
| **Moderate** | Dominant mechanisms: consensus framing and institutional language | Based on n=24 motions; classification is qualitative |
| **Inconclusive** | Whether extreme content genuinely declined or was repackaged in milder language | 2D scoring separates style from substance, but temporal content shift unmeasured
