Kai Arzheimer » italy http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog A political science blog Sat, 21 Jan 2012 19:06:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 The Alternative Italian Job: Disbanding the Army that Never Washttp://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/the-alternative-italian-job-disbanding-the-army-that-never-was/ http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/the-alternative-italian-job-disbanding-the-army-that-never-was/#comments Sun, 08 Feb 2009 14:44:33 +0000 kai http://polsci.wordpress.com/2009/02/08/the-alternative-italian-job-disbanding-the-army-that-never-was/ The Guardian had a wonderful short article last week. Apparently, Italy invented a 300,000 strong army in the 1950s as part of the great game that was the Cold War. And apparently they assumed that the first thing the Soviet spies would watch out for were neither tanks nor barrackes, but an active bureaucracy (something both the Russians and the Italians were familiar with), so they created tonnes and tonnes of fake files relating to this fantasy army. Today, these files clog the real army’s warehouses: since the imagined 3rd corps was disbanded in the 1970s, it cannot declassify its files. And while they are not declassified, they cannot be destroyed. Se non e vero, e molto ben trovato.

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]]> http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/the-alternative-italian-job-disbanding-the-army-that-never-was/feed/ 0 What Drives the Extreme Right Vote: Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment?http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/extreme-right-vote-protest-neo-liberalism-anti-immigrant-sentiment/ http://www.kai-arzheimer.com/blog/extreme-right-vote-protest-neo-liberalism-anti-immigrant-sentiment/#comments Fri, 29 Aug 2008 18:21:23 +0000 kai http://polsci.wordpress.com/?p=72 Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radvb What Drives the Extreme Right Vote: Protest, Neo Liberalism or Anti Immigrant Sentiment?ical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme right vote (the “unpolitical” protest hypothesis and the hypothesis that the Far Right in Western Europe attracts people with “neo-liberal” economic preferences, championed by Betz and Kitschelt in the 1990s) do exist. Just a few days ago, a journal has accepted a paper by me in which I test these three competing hypotheses using (relatively) recent data from the European Social Survey and a little Structural Equation Modelling. As it turns out, protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact on the Extreme Right vote whatsoever. Anti-immigrant sentiment, however, plays a crucial role for the Extreme Right in all countries but Italy. Its effects are moderated by party identification and general ideological preferences. Moreover, the effect of immigrant sentiment is moderate by general ideological preferences and party identification. I conclude that comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised. Wasn’t it blindingly obvious?

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