Die Wähler der extremen Rechten (German Edition) eBook: Kai Arzheimer: leondumoulin.nl: Kindle Store.
Table of contents
- 'Dead Men Walking?' Party Identification in Germany, - kai arzheimer
- Welcome to Omani Nagi Music
- Introduction
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Write a review Rate this item: Preview this item Preview this item. Aufl View all editions and formats Rating: Subjects Elections -- European Union countries. Voting -- European Union countries. Right-wing extremists -- European Union countries. View all subjects More like this Similar Items. Find a copy online Links to this item Table of contents from Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Allow this favorite library to be seen by others Keep this favorite library private. Find a copy in the library Finding libraries that hold this item Internet resource Document Type: Kai Arzheimer Find more information about: Reviews User-contributed reviews Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers.
Add a review and share your thoughts with other readers. Because the average number of publications per year is relatively low 1. Nonetheless, it seems safe to assume that the field has overcome its most blatant shortcoming: To get a more rounded view of the field by digging into the relationships amongst authors and concepts, it is necessary to make additional use of commercial bibliographic data sources such as the Social Science Citation Index SSCI.
Third, such querys are entirely key-word based and may return items which belong into the general domain of social science research but are not at all related to the research question at hand. As of January , the first query returns hits, and the second query returns By and large, this confirms the findings on their relative importance reported in the previous section. Also in line with these findings is the relatively low degree of overlap in the use of both phrases: To make the data more comparable, this list was further restricted to journal articles and book chapters 3 , excluding a surprisingly large number of book reviews and other documents.
A cursory glance at the titles of the remaining items identified about 20 unrelated articles, chiefly from the fields of brain research, motor-perception research, and genetics, which were removed. The key advantage of using these data is that the SSCI records all the sources that each item on the database cites, including most titles which are themselves not covered by the SSCI. Put differently, roughly every third of the articles published after cites this book. Two other monographs are also frequently cited but appreciably less popular than the books by Betz, Kitschelt, and Mudde: The five other items are journal articles with a primarily empirical outlook that lack conceptual ambitions.
If this was indeed the case, the literature should display a low degree of separation by the respective labels. By definition, a co-citations represent a view on the older literature as it is expressed in a newer publication. Because the SSCI aims at recording every source that is cited by the titles and because most of these sources are themselves not included in the dataset, the number of candidate publications for co-citations is very large: Less than half a per cent of these potential co-citations do exist, but their absolute number is still very large: To get a handle on this unwieldy co-citation network, the twenty publications with the biggest total number of co-citations and their interconnections were extracted.
Many of them are familiar, because the most-cited sources from Table [most-cited-in-ssrc] are all included in this group see Table [top-twenty-co-cited]. These titles represent something like the intellectual backbone of ERRS. Figure [fig-network] depicts the top co-citation network. The width of the lines is proportional to the number of co-citations connecting the titles. The most obvious finding from Figure [fig-network] is that the network is almost complete: This already suggests that the field has not split into incompatible schools.
Moreover, there are some very strong ties that bridge the supposed intellectual cleavages, e. Intuitively, it would seem as if co-citations were chiefly driven by the general prominence of the titles involved, whereas the use of compatible terminology seems to play a minor role. This intuition can be formalised and statistically tested by means of an appropriate regression model. The unconditional mean number of co-citations is Overdispersion will result in invalid estimates for the standard errors. Regression of the number co-citations within top on external co-citations and use of terminology.
The former differs from the latter only insofar as it contains one additional parameter that accounts for the excess variation in the counts but is of no substantive interest, while the interpretation of the regression coefficients does not change. The coefficients refer to the linear-additive parameterisation of the model, which gives a sense of the direction of the effects but not much more.
By exponentiating them, the model can be transformed to a multiplicative form, which is somewhat more accessible, but nonlinear: The model constant 2. By the same logic, exponentiating the coefficient for using the same terminology 0. Holding everything else constant, co-citations are 53 per cent more likely if two works use the same terminology. The effect of the sum of external co-citations as a measure of general popularity is also positive, but very small 0.
Exponentiating shows that each additional external co-citation is equivalent to an increase of 0. One must, however, keep in mind that each of these 20 titles has thousands of external co-citations, and that the variation in this count is in the thousands, too. As can be seen in Figure [fig-margins-terminology], the expected number of co-citations is largely unaffected by the question of terminology for works that have between 6, and 8, external co-citations. From this point on, the expected number of co-citations grows somewhat more quickly for dyads that share the same terminology.
However, over the whole range of 6, to 12, external co-citations, the confidence intervals overlap and so this difference is not statistically significant.
Unless two titles have a very high number of external co-citations, the probability of them being both cited in a third work does not depend on the terminology they use, and even for the few heavily cited works, the evidence is insufficient to reject the null hypothesis that terminology makes no difference.
While the analysis is confined to the relationships between just 20 titles, it can be argued that these titles matter most, because they form the core of ERRS. If we cannot find separation here, that does not necessarily mean that it does not happen elsewhere, but if happens elsewhere, that is much less relevant.
For better or worse, European Radical Right studies have thrived over the last three decades, although for a long time, the subfield could not even agree on the name of its core concept. They are inherently flexible and can attract new scholars to a field. Importantly, however, many scholars in the field recognised the need for a clear er concept and were all to willing to replace their favourite bicycle with something that was at least slightly more stable and much better understood.
The University of Manitoba Press. Contextual factors and the extreme right vote in western europe, Political opportunity structures and right-wing extremist party success. Politischer extremismus in demokratischen verfassungsstaaten. Meaning and forms of political extremism in past and present.
Cinderella and her ugly sisters: Explaining social democratic responses to the challenge from the populist radical right in western europe. Radical right-wing populism in western europe. Anti-immigrant parties in europe: Ideological or protest vote? Why some anti-immigrant parties fail and others succeed. The extreme right in western europe. Explaining variation in the success of extreme right parties in western europe.
Right-wing extremism in europe. The politics of the extreme right. Extreme right parties in western europe. What unites right-wing populists in western europe? Re-examining grievance mobilization models in seven successful cases. Conditions favouring parties of the extreme right in western europe. The radical right in western europe. The University of Michigan Press. The ecological correlates of right-wing extremism in western europe. The politics of unreason. Extreme right-wing voting in western europe. The role of mainstream party strategy in niche party success.
Encounters with the contemporary radical right. The revival of right-wing extremism in the 90s. Right-wing extremism in the twenty-first century. The war of words. The ideology of the extreme right. Populist radical right parties in europe. Three decades of populist radical right parties in western europe: The sociology of the radical right. Co-citation in the scientific literature. The thin ideology of populism. Regression models for count data in r. Within the larger field of Radical Right studies, the question of why people vote for Radical Right Parties RRPs has attracted a large perhaps disproportionally so chunk of scholarly attention.
There are at least three reasons for this. First, the early and rather humble electoral successes of the Radical Right in Western Europe during the early s stirred memories of the and s, when parties such as the Italian Fascists or the German Nazis rose from obscurity to overturn democracy Prowe, Given these traumatic experiences, scholars were understandably eager to analyse the motives behind such potentially fatal electoral choices.
Second, when it became increasingly clear that the most electorally successful of these RRPs were not just clones of the old fascist right of the inter war years but rather belonged to a new party family Mudde, , researchers wanted to understand the social forces that brought about the rise of this largely unexpected phenomenon.
Third, support for the Radical Right displays an unusual degree of variation across time and space. In the Netherlands, which featured extremist but tiny right-wing parties in the s and s, modern RRPs only emerged in the early s. Belgium provides perhaps the most striking example of variability: To summarise, there is ample reason for treating support for the Radical Right as an unusual and potentially even dangerous phenomenon.
The most obvious way to study Radical Right voting would be to apply the standard tools of electoral research. Modern election studies usually rely on an eclectic blend of variables and alleged mechanisms, but at the core, there is usually the assumption that voters respond to short-term factors candidates and political issues on the one hand, and long-to-medium forces party loyalties, value orientations, ideological convictions and group memberships on the other.
Almost sixty years ago, Angus Campbell and his associates Campbell, have proposed a conceptual framework that encompasses these and other variables: Decades of criticism not withstanding, this framework still explicitly or implicitly undergirds most empirical research into voting behaviour. Nonetheless, the funnel metaphor still provides a useful template for organising and comparing competing and complementary explanations for Radical Right electoral support. A number of other relevant factors, however, do not sit easily within the confines of this dichotomy.
These features of the wider political system may explain why would-be political entrepreneurs decide to enter the political arena to provide a RRP supply, or why a given demand for RRP policies may help or hurt the mainstream right parties. Put differently, many institutional factors should be seen as mediators of supply and demand rather than as members of either category.
Other system-level variables — most prominently unemployment and immigration — are best understood as distal causes of demand, or as an incentives to provide supply. Therefore, it seems more fruitful to distinguish between variables on the micro, meso, and macro level, and the remainder of this chapter will proceed accordingly. Most approaches , however, more or less explicitly follow the logic of a multi-level explanation Coleman, , requiring occasional cross-references between the sections. The literature on this topic is already vast and keeps on growing quickly.
My self-consciously eclectic bibliography on the Radical Right in Europe http: The literature review in this chapter is therefore by necessity highly selective and idiosyncratic: I will focus on Western Europe, and on a small number of contributions that I consider landmarks. Although comparative multi-level analyses are now something like the gold standard in the field, I will also consider single-country case studies where they present results that probably generalise beyond the polity in question, or designs that are of a more general interest.
Moreover, while there is always the danger of aggregation bias lurking in the background, I will frequently discuss findings from field-defining aggregate studies, without re-iterating the usual warnings about the ecological fallacy Robinson, time and again. Party identification is arguably the most important factor when it comes to explaining voting decisions, but it is conspicuously underrepresented in the literature on the Radical Right.
One possible explanation for this is the fact that party identification is supposed to be acquired through years, if not decades of political socialisation. As many RRPs only rose to prominence in the s and s, identification with them could hardly be a major factor behind their ascendancy. A more modern approach highlights the negative effect of identifications with other parties. Building on the notion derived from the older literature, e. Kitschelt and Ignazi that the rise of the Radical Right only became possible once there was a sufficiently large pool of voters that were no longer attached to any of the established parties, Arzheimer and Carter a focus on the lack of identifications with mainstream right-wing parties.
Put differently, they see the absence of other identifications as a necessary if insufficient pre-condition for Radical Right-wing voting. However, some of the most successful RRPs e. Arzheimer, b account for this potential positive effect of party identification. There are two reasons for this: Second, many RRPs appeared to be personal parties, especially during the break-through phase Eatwell, , p. Third, agency is always more attractive than structure. Even more importantly for the question of electoral behaviour, Brug and Mughan demonstrate that RRPs benefit from candidate effects in exactly the same way as established parties: While having an appealing candidate is certainly linked to greater electoral support, the magnitude of this effect is not larger than it is for other parties.
A more realistic variety of the protest thesis suggests that voters do indeed care about policies but hold less extreme preferences than the Radical Right manifestos would suggest. In this scenario, voters instrumentally support the Radical Right in the hope that mainstream right parties will reconsider their position and move somewhat closer to the Radical Right without copying all of their policies.
Once the mainstream right has made this adjustment, Radical Right support would collapse. This logic is akin to directional voting Merrill and Grofman, but puts more emphasis on emotions. Empirically, pure protest voting remains elusive. That does not mean that the prototypical voter of the Radical Right is not alienated from the political elites and susceptible to the populist rhetoric of many RRPs.
But the vast majority of their voters support the Radical Right because of their anti-immigrant claims and demands, and their sense of frustration and distrust may very well result from their political preferences on immigration not being heeded by the mainstream parties. Anti-immigrant sentiment is a handy but slightly awkward catch-all term for negative attitudes towards immigrants, immigration, and immigration policies. For Rydgren , pp. As Rydgren , p. The distinction between immigration sceptics, xenophobes, and racists is particularly useful because not all Radical Right voters are full-blown racists.
Moreover, many of the approaches that are discussed in the literature may help to explain deep-seated, stable racism but not necessarily a more specific and volatile scepticism regarding current immigration policies. The monographs and articles on the roots of rightist political views fill several libraries by now and any attempt to classify them is crude by necessity.
Nonetheless, it makes sense to distinguish between three very broad groups. A first class of explanations focuses on personality traits 2 , with authoritarianism being the most prominent amongst them. Authoritarianism as a concept is most closely associated with the controversial Berkeley Study Adorno et al. Authoritarianism and similar concepts such as dogmatism Rokeach, or tough-mindedness Eysenck, go a long way towards explaining the relevance of xenophobia and the appeal of other right-wing ideas and movements to some voters, but there are a few important caveats.
First, compared to classic right-wing extremist groups, authoritarianism is much less important for the ideology of the modern populist Radical Right Mudde, Second, support for the Radical Right has surged and sometimes declined over relatively short periods, whereas personality traits are by definition stable. They may thus help us to explain why there is potential for authoritarian parties in the first place. The exploitation of this potential by political entrepreneurs and the channeling of this general hostility towards out-groups into a more specific anti-immigrant sentiment, however, are political processes that must be understood by means of different concepts.
Theories of group conflict and deprivation form a second and more immediately relevant cluster of explanations. This cluster can be subdivided in four broad categories. The ordering is deliberate: From the top to the bottom, these approaches put less and less emphasis on material conflicts and conscious mental processes and instead focus on the importance of visceral hostility which might still be induced by political entrepreneurs towards members of the out-group. The main difference between both approaches is that RGCT is more interested in the micro-dynamics of group psychology whereas EC is primarily concerned with the societal level.
Either way, the distributional conflict is couched in collective terms, even if the resource in question is a personal good e. Both strands of the literature as well as the other approaches discussed in this section are therefore closely related to classic theories of collective relative deprivation Runciman, , pp. On the contextual level, potential exposure to material threats if often captured by incorporating macro-economic variables in statistical models of Radical Right voting see below.
Hofstadter, b argue that recent immigrants are perceived as a collective threat by members of the in-group. Again, psephologists usually take the alleged causal mechanisms for granted and focus on the effect of perceived cultural threats on anti-immigrant sentiment and the Radical Right vote. Modern theories of social identity provide another approach for explaining anti-immigrant sentiment. As a corrolary, members of the out-group are subject to a process of stereotyping. In combination with an innate desire for positive distinctiveness, stereotyping and self-stereotyping can bring about discrimination and prejudice against out-group members, because they represent one avenue towards a more positive self-image.
However, whether discrimination actually occurs depends on a number of conditions Reynolds and Turner, , p. Crucially, these mechanisms are independent of any material or cultural threat that the out-group may seem to pose to the members of the in-group. Once more, psephologists have mostly ignored the details and instead focused on the impact of a single variable identity on Radical Right voting intentions, and even this alleged mechanism is often problematic, because most items available in representative surveys do not capture the complexity of the concept.
It also provides a useful framework for the analysis of party documents and social and mass media content, which play an ever more important role in the study of Radical Right electoral support. These hark back to the late s Dollard et al. Some of the newer research aims at incorporating the contact hypothesis by either using micro-level information on inter-ethnic contact or by deriving the probability of such contacts from small-area data on the spatial distribution of ethnic groups.
Unfortunately, both approaches are subject to endogeneity bias, because voters who are less prejudiced are more likely to seek inter-ethnic contacts.
'Dead Men Walking?' Party Identification in Germany, - kai arzheimer
Immigration emerged as the core issue of the Radical Right in Western Europe and Australia in the mids, making anti-immigrant sentiment the single most important attitudinal driver of Radical Right support. But very few RRPs have ever been single-issue parties Mudde, Many of them have a broader right-wing agenda, and Radical Right support has been linked to a host of other attitudes than anti-immigrant sentiment. The Rise of the RRP family in the s and early s has therefore been interpreted as a reaction to large-scale social change. Similarly, Kitschelt has argued that globalisation has created a new class of authoritarian private-sector workers, who combine market-liberal preferences with an authoritarian outlook on society and find their political representation in the Radical Right.
Moral conservatism, homophobia and more generally anti-postmaterialism may have played a role, too and probably are still relevant for party members and activists , but they seem to be much less important than they were for the classic Extreme Right, at least in some countries. But even in the Netherlands, culturally progressive values are not an important driver of the RRP vote, at least not when anti-immigrant sentiment is controlled for De Koster et al. One way or the other, for many RRP voters in Western Europe, homophobia and social conservatism do not seem to matter too much any more.
Religion The Extreme Right of the interwar years could be roughly divided in two groups Camus, In some cases most prominently Portugal and Spain , they aligned themselves with the most authoritarian and reactionary elements of the Catholic church. In other instances e. In a bid to disentangle this relationship, Arzheimer and Carter a estimate a Structural Equation Model of religiosity, anti-immigrant sentiment, party identification with mainstream right parties, and Radical Right voting intentions in seven West European countries. Their results show that in the early s, religiosity had no significantly positive or negative effect on either anti-immigrant sentiment or RRP voting intentions.
Religious people are, however, much more likely to identify with a mainstream right party, which in turn massively reduces the likelihood of an RRP vote. Using a slightly different model and data collected in , Immerzeel, Jaspers, and Lubbers arrive at very similar conclusions. At any rate, talking about crime and immigration is a core frame of Radical Right discourses Rydgren, Data from the European Social Survey clearly show that many West Europeans associate immigration with crime, and panel data from Germany suggest that that worries about crime have a substantial effect on anti-immigrant sentiment Fitzgerald, Curtis, and Corliss, Many authors subsume such immigration-related crime fears into the larger complex of subjective threat that immigration poses to susceptible voters.
Others model the effect of objective crime figures on the Radical Right vote see below. Euroscepticism Mudde has convincingly argued that nativism , i. Accordingly, RRPs reject the European Union as a general rule, although Vasilopoulou has demonstrated that opposition to the European projects is by no means uniform within the Radical Right camp. Unsurprisingly, individual eurosceptic attitudes come up as predictors of Radical Right voting intentions in some studies e.
Arzheimer, a; Brug, Fennema, and Tillie, , although anti-immigrant and even general dissatisfaction with the elites exert a stronger effect Werts, Scheepers, and Lubbers, Given that at least some countries feature leftist eurosceptic parties whose voters hold opinions which differ markedly from those of the RRP voters Evans, ; Elsas and Brug, , it seems safe to assume that euroscepticism per se does not predispose voters to support the Radical Right but needs to be linked to more general nativist beliefs.
It is more than plausible that organisational assets and other party resources including leadership should be important pre-conditions for RRP success, but in applied research, they are often overlooked, because they are difficult to measure and tend not to vary too much over time. Carter is one of the very few studies that systematically incorporates party strength into a quantitative model of Radical Right support. Taking a longitudinal perspective, Art shows that prospective RRPs need to attract ideologically moderate, high-status activists early in the process to build sustainable party structures and become electorally viable.
Otherwise, there is a high probability that they will be subject to factionalism and extremism, which renders them unattractive for most voters. While Art and Carter compare parties and countries, it is also possible to incorporate information on organisational strength in a within-country model of Radical Right voting. One the one hand, this modelling strategy is advantageous, because it maximises the number of cases and can avoid aggregation bias.
As a general rule, RRPs take political positions that are in some ways more radical than what the mainstream right is offering, but the ideological heterogeneity of the RRPs is sometimes baffling. There are various attempts to distinguish between subgroups within this large cluster. Summarising electoral data from Western Europe for the period, Golder b, p. By and large, this finding still holds today: A different classification, which is not based on the fundamental question of support for democracy but rather on policy positions, was developed by Herbert Kitschelt in his seminal monograph Kitschelt, Kitschelt aims at locating RRPs in a policy space that is spanned by two dimensions: RRPs do not operate in a vacuum.
Presumably, there are two major and partly competing mechanisms at work: From a Downsian logic, it follows that a successful RRP will eventually emerge if there is a demand for more restrictive migration policies, which is not satisfied by the existing parties in general and the mainstream right in particular. The psychological counter-argument is that political demands are rarely fixed, and that an elite consensus to de-emphasise immigration as a political issue Zaller, and to impose a cordon sanitaire might rob the Radical Right of its potential support.
Whether this latter strategy is politically feasible is quite a different question. Centre-right parties may have strong incentives to shore up the Radical Right in a bid to strengthen the rightist bloc Bale, Centre left parties may want to split the right-wing vote: The empirical evidence is somewhat mixed. This result, however, may be shaped by the inclusion of respondents from Austria, which features a long and almost unique history of Grand Coalitions and a consistently strong RRP.
Again, endogeneity could potentially be a problem in these studies, although this seems less likely in the case of data based on an expert survey Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers, or party manifestos Arzheimer and Carter, ; Arzheimer, a. If this relationship holds, higher levels of Social Capital Putnam, should curb support for the Radical Right.
Once more, the empirical evidence is limited and contradictory. In a series of case studies in Western and Eastern Europe, Rydgren ; finds that membership in civic organisations does not reduce the probability of casting a vote for the Radical Right. But this does not necessarily disconfirm the Social Capital hypothesis, because Social Capital is not an individual-level but rather a meso-level concept. But while their research design and statistical model are close to ideal, it is not quite clear what they actually measure. Their index includes the proportion of the working population who are not commuters, the proportion of residents who speak the most common language in a given municipality, and the percent of residencies inhabited by their owners.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, empirical findings are mostly contradictory and inconclusive. As regards electoral systems, Jackman and Volpert claim that the Radical Right benefits from lower electoral thresholds, but Golder a argues that this conclusion is based on an erroneous interpretation of an interaction effect and a somewhat idiosyncratic data collection effort. In the same vain, Carter reports that electoral support for the Radical Right is unrelated to the type of electoral system that is in place in a given election, whereas Arzheimer and Carter find a positive effect of more disproportional systems but maintain that this might be an artefact.
As regards features of the welfare state, Swank and Betz find that higher level of welfare state protection seem to reduce the appeal of the Radical Right.
However, their analysis is based exclusively on macro data. For obvious reasons, the two macro-level variables whose effects have been most extensively studied are immigration, unemployment, and their interaction: Nonetheless, the findings are far from conclusive, as can be seen by looking at two of the first comprehensive comparative studies: While Jackman and Volpert find a substantial positive effect of aggregate unemployment on the Radical Right vote, Knigge , who uses a design that is quite similar, reports a negative effect.
So do Arzheimer and Carter Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers , in their first multi-level model of Radical Right voting in Western Europe, find no significant relationship between the unemployment rate the Radical Right voting intentions, whereas Golder b , whose analysis is once more based on aggregate data, reports a positive main effect as well as a positive interaction between unemployment and immigration.
Although measures for immigration are hardly ideal and differ across studies, results for the effect of immigration are less equivocal: Knigge , Lubbers, Gijsberts, and Scheepers , Golder b , Swank and Betz , and Arzheimer and Carter all find a positive effect of national immigration figures on the likelihood of a Radical Right vote. Arzheimer a by and large confirms this, although with an important qualification: In his study, the interaction between unemployment and immigration is negative so that a high levels of both variables, their effects do not reinforce each other any more but rather hit a ceiling.
Moreover, generous unemployment benefits reduce the effect of immigration. Like immigration and unemployment, high crime rates are supposed to benefit the Radical Right, but there is not much empirical evidence to back up this claim. In an aggregate model of Vlaams Blok support in Flemish municipalities, they find that high crime rates increase the likelihood of the Vlaams Blok contesting an election, presumably because the party anticipates higher levels of support.
It models the decision to compete in an election and the results of that decision separately, it is built on a large number of cases, and the level of aggregation is low. But unfortunately, their design does not allow for comparisons across time or political systems. In a sense, the article by Smith provides the complement to their work: Smith studies the relationship between support for the Radical Right and crime rates at the highest possible level of aggregation by analysing national parliamentary elections that were held in 19 Western European countries between and Controlling for unemployment, inflation, immigration, and various interactions, he finds that higher crime rates are associated with stronger support for the Radical Right.
This relationship becomes stronger if immigration rates are higher. Finally, the contribution by Dinas and Spanje specify a multi-level model of Radical Right voting in the Netherlands in As they combine individual and contextual data, there is no aggregation bias, and they can even tease apart the effects of objective crime rates and subjective attitudes towards crime.
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Their results suggest that the effects of crime and immigration do not operate across the board but rather only affect those citizens who perceive a link between the two. While voters will be exposed to crime, immigration and unemployment to one degree or another, media reports may have a stronger effect than personal experiences or non-experiences via two alleged mechanisms: Theories of agenda setting claim that the media, by focusing on certain topics, select a handful of politically relevant issues from a much larger pool of problems.
Those issues on the agenda then serve as yardsticks for evaluating parties, an effect known as priming Scheufele and Tewksbury, Green parties and the environment are an oft-cited example, but the Radical Right and immigration have become a close second in the eyes of many observers Meguid, Notwithstanding the importance of the alleged nexus between media coverage and Radical Right support, the evidence is limited once more.
The main reason for this is that data on media content are difficult to come by and expensive to produce in the first place. This is slowly changing now, with automated coding methods and open data bases such as GDELT providing new avenues for research, but even so, matching media with micro-level data is next to impossible, because mass opinion surveys do not normally collect detailed i. Most of the existing research is therefore based on aggregated i.
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In their pioneering study, Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart find a positive relationship between salience of immigration in Dutch media and aggregate support for Radical Right parties during the period, net of any changes that can be ascribed to the unemployment and immigration rates and their interaction.
This article is complemented by Koopmans and Muis , who focus on the end of that period i. In another study that resembles their piece Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart, , Boomgaarden and Vliegenthart can further demonstrate a link between news content and anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany for the period. Finally, in a bid to overcome the dearth of micro-level data on media consumption from mass surveys as well as the limits of the ex-post-facto design, interest in in experimental studies has grown considerably over the last decade.
One such study is that by Sheets, Bos, and Boomgaarden , who exposed members of an online-access panel to an synthetic news article. While Sheets, Bos, and Boomgaarden can demonstrate some effects of these cues on anti-immigrant attitudes, political cynicism, and ultimately on PVV support, some question marks remain. First, the effects on anti-immigrant attitudes are weak compared to those on political cynicism. Third, the experiment was designed in a way that means that the immigration and anti-politics cues were always combined with an RRP cue, which will in all likelihood bias the estimates for their respective effects either upwards or downwards.
Clearly, further cross-national research is needed. By now it should be clear that nearly all authors in the field treat support for the Radical Right as a multi-faceted phenomenon that must be explained at multiple levels, with unemployment, immigration, and political factors and media cues being the most prominent contextual variables. Most studies measure these variables at the national level, but living conditions in European states vary considerably across regions, so designs that compare provinces, districts or even neighbourhoods within countries are becoming more and more prominent.
Economic deprivation though not necessarily unemployment also played a role. Other studies have focused on units that are larger but politically more meaningful than census districts or electoral wards, e. The former study reports positive effects of unemployment and some institutional variables but no effect of immigration, whereas the latter identifies some complex interactions that link immigration and unemployment to Radical Right support via an increase in inequality and a lack of social capital.
Studies in small ish areas are currently one of the most promising avenues of research into the Radical Right vote, be it on the level of subnational political units or in even smaller tracts. Either way, researchers need to account for the fact that an increasing number of voters are either immigrants or the offspring of immigrants, who will be disinclined to support the Radical Right.
Estimates from small area studies that are based on aggregate data will therefore be biased downward Arzheimer and Carter, b. Hence, multi-level analyses that combine micro data with information on local living conditions are the way forward in this particular branch of research.
Over the last three decades, Radical Right parties have become a permanent feature of most European polities. Their rise, persistence, and decline can be quite well explained by the usual apparatus of electoral studies. On the micro level, the most important factors are value orientations, attitudes towards social groups, candidates and political issues as well as the lack of party identifications.
At the macro level, social change broadly defined undoubtedly plays an important role, while parties, the media and all other sorts collective actors operate at the meso-level in between. And indeed, there can be very little doubt that the presence or absence of immigrants and immigration, the frequency and nature of contacts between the immigrants and the native population, and the way immigration is framed by other political actors and the media is a major contributing factor to Radical Right support. However, given that immigration, ethnic tensions, and RRP actors are almost ubiquitous in Western societies, their success is not a major surprise.
Ultimately, trying to understand why they are not successful in some cases might be more rewarding, both politically and intellectually. Journal of Political Ideologies Inside the Radical Right. American Journal of Political Science Comparative Governance and Politics 2, pp. Arzheimer, Kai and Elisabeth Carter European Journal of Political Research 45, pp. West European Politics European Journal of Political Research West European Politics 26, pp. American Sociological Review 56, pp. With a New Introduction by David Plotke. Right-Wing Extremism in Western Europe. Billiet, Jaak and Hans Witte European Journal of Political Research 27, pp.
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Introduction
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Smith, Jason Matthew Mapping the Extreme Right in Contemporary Europe. From Local to Transnational. Sumner, William Graham Swank, Duane and Hans-Georg Betz Socio-Economic Review 1, pp. Electoral Studies 20, pp. Tajfel, Henri and John C. Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Government and Opposition The Nature and Origin of Mass Opinion. Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Scheuch and Klingemann, Germany is unusual amongst West European countries because all relevant parties with the possible exception of the Left party are unwavering supporters of European integration.
However, in , only months before the General Election, a new party was formed that campaigned for a dissolution of the Eurozone and a radical re-configuration of German foreign policy. Nine months on, the party polled seven per cent in the European parliamentary election and was eventually admitted to the European Conservatives and Reformists group ECR , which further soured the relationship between German Chancellor Angela Merkel and British Prime Minister David Cameron.
The AfD has been described as eurosceptic and right-wing populist 1 by its political rivals and by the mainstream media. If this description was correct, it would signal a qualitative shift in the structure of party competition in Germany. It is, however not at all clear if and to what degree such a classification of the AfD is warranted, as those terms are used rather indiscriminately in mediated discourses Bale, Kessel, and Taggart The aim of this article is therefore simply to assess the AfD based on categories derived from the rich comparative literature on the Radical Right and on euroscepticism.
The remainder of this article is organised as follows: The next section briefly reviews the concepts that will be used in the analyses. The third section provides some background information on euroscepticism and right-wing radicalism in Germany, and on the short career of the AfD. The final section summarises the main findings and puts them into perspective. In the early s, a new group of right-wing parties emerged in Western Europe. These parties differed significantly and systematically from mainstream parties of the right and were therefore portrayed as a new party family in the scholarly literature.
More recently, Mudde has proposed a new scheme for classifying right-wing parties outside the mainstream that has won international acclaim because it accommodates a wide range of parties while identifying important differences between them. Nativism is a broad concept that subsumes racism, ethnocentrism, and anti-immigrant sentiment. Nativism holds that non-native elements persons, ideas, or policies present a threat to the nation state, which should be as homogeneous as possible. However, traces of nativism may be found within the manifestos of mainstream parties. Following Mudde , 21—23 , to qualify as a Radical Right, a party additionally needs to display authoritarian tendencies, i.
With authoritarianism comes a political bent that is not necessarily anti-democratic per se but goes against the grain of some of the fundamental values and principles of liberal democracy Mudde , 25—26 such as tolerance, pluralism, and the protection of minorities and their rights. Within the Radical Right, Mudde then identifies a subgroup of parties that is also populist in nature. This Populist Radical Right is arguably the most electorally successful subtype within the larger party family.
Finally, a small and not necessarily populist subgroup of the Radical Right is actually anti-democratic. Euroscepticism broadly refers to a negative stance towards European integration.