Just out: Backes/Moreau (Eds) The Extreme Right in Europe

Like a premature Christmas present, my author’s copy of “The Extreme Right in Europe” arrived before the weekend. It’s a hefty volume of almost 500 pages that comes with a equally hefty price tag of just under 80 Euros. As you can see from the table of contents (the PDF also contains the introduction and…

Working Class Parties 2.0? Competition between Centre Left and Extreme Right Parties

One feels almost sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. Here’s the preprint of a chapter I’m preparing on that topic.

Extreme Right Voting Literature Review

I’ve recently converted my Strassburg talk on the social base of the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe into a chapter for the volume that documents the conference.  The result is a medium-length review of the literature on the Extreme Right’s electorate that tries to cover the main points from some twenty years worth of…

Is salience a cause or a consequence of radical right electoral support?

In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties [caption id="attachment_303" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react"][/caption] makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument:…

New Blog on the German 2009 Elections

Colleagues Andrea Römmele and Thorsten Faas have set up a new blog that will cover the many German elections of 2009 (seats in the federal parliament, several state parliaments, local councils as well as the presidency are all up for grabs) and asked me to contribute. How could I resist them? “Wahlen nach Zahlen” (voting…

Does Immigration help or hurt the Front National in France?

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 on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most…

What Drives the Extreme Right Vote: Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment?

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 – Radical 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…