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Here is the (almost) finalised program for the our section on the Radical Right in Perspective, organised under the auspices of the ECPR’s 5th General Conference (Potsdam, September 10-12), boasting about 50 papers. Continue reading “The Radical Right in Perspective: Program (ECPR conference 2009)” »
My article on Contextual Factors (unemployment, immigration, other parties) and the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe between 1980 and 2002 was yesterday published in the American Journal of Political Science (online). Obviously, I’m absolutely chuffed. The DOI (doi:10.1111/j.1540-5907.2009.00369.x) does not work yet, but the link to Wiley Interscience does. Here is the full bibliographic information.
Multilevel replication data and scripts for Stata and MLWin are available via my dataverse. Continue reading “AJPS article on the Extreme Right published” »
Over the last 7 years or so, much of my work has focused on the question of why support for the Extreme Right is so unstable over time and so uneven across countries. In a recent paper on Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002, I estimate a model that aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modelling strategy, i.e. multi-level modelling. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for. Replication data for this article is available from my dataverse.
The final version of the paper will appear in the April issue of the American Journal of Political Science, which is obviously great.
Continue reading “Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002” »
Finally, the call for papers for the ECPR’s 5th conference (at Potsdam, September 10-12 2009) is out. Our section on the Radical Right will consist of the following nine panels:
Continue reading “Call for Papers: Perspectives on the Radical Right” »
In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects o
n the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most interestingly, immigration (which is usually a very good predictor for the radical right vote) had no effect on the success of the Front National. More generally, they argue that a subnational approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses (now the most common approach to this phenomenon). My colleague Liz Carter and I disagreed and engaged in a massive replication/re-analysis endeavour. The outcome is a critique of the KS model of subnational political opportunity structures in regional elections. In this paper, we dispute Kestilä’s and Söderlund’s claims on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrate that their findings are spurious. Today, the European Journal has accepted the article for publication (probably in 2009) 
Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, populist right, far right, france, opportunity structures, unemployment, immigration, district magnitude, regional elections, front national, 2004, voting
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 – Rad
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?
Technorati-Tags: extreme right, radical right, populist right, far right, sem, structural equation modelling, western europe, italy, immigration, comparative politics, european social survey, voting, voters
Over the last 25 years, the study of the extreme / radical / populist right
has blossomed as a sub-discipline of both party and electoral research.
As well as becoming the focus of significant case-specific and
comparative work in stable democracies, the end of communism and the
integration of the New Democracies in Central and Eastern Europe into
the European Union has further spurred interest in these parties and
their voters. Equally, additional subdisciplinary literatures including
political communication, political economy, public opinion and
political theory now constitute a core part of the corpus of work on
these organizations.
In a bid to bring together state-of-the-art research from these approaches, Liz Carter and I will organise a section titled “Perspectives on the Radical Right” during the ECPR’s 5th General Conference at the University of Potsdam in Germany in September 2009. The section will consist of eight panels, each with slots for 4-5 papers. A few days ago, a formal call for Panels within this section on the Extreme / Radical / Populist Right was issued. Panel chairs do not have to be members of ECPR institutions, so anyone interested in organising a panel can submit a proposal through the website. The deadline for panel proposals is September 1, 2008. A call for papers will be issued in November 2008.
Continue reading “Section: Perspectives on the Radical Right” »
