kai arzheimer

222 new pieces of research on the radical right

222 new pieces of research on the radical right 5

The 2024 update of the far right bibliography

Today, I’m releasing a shiny new version of the Eclectic, Erratic Bibliography on the Extreme Right (in (Western) Europe)™. With 222 new titles, this is the biggest update ever. It is more than twice the size of last year’s update (which had been the biggest until today) and increases the total number of titles by some 18% to 1436 titles. To use the technical term: it is an absolute monster.

By clicking this link, you can browse the list or download the latest full version of the bibliography in a format (BibTeX) that most reference managers will import. For long-time users of the bibliography, there is also an incremental update that contains just the titles that have been added since April 2023.

Lazy? Just watch the video

Why, I hear you say, why such a big update? There are three reasons for that. First, the quantity and quality of what my colleagues are churning out each day is incredible (and sometimes makes me green with envy). While the bibliography remains eclectic (and sometimes) erratic insofar as it reflects my own idiosyncratic interests, there is just so much good stuff out there. Second, one of my favourite colleagues, the fantastic Sarah de Lange, has generously donated dozens of references that she has collected over the last year. Third (and I find this in some way rather depressing), this type of research gets more relevant every day, and the Zeitgeist drives me to find answers to questions that pop up every time I switch on the news. To paraphrase Cas Mudde: I long for the days when we were studying fringe politics.

But now, without further ado, let’s have a look at this research.

When and where was this research published?

More than half of the new additions were published in 2023 while a staggering 25 per cent were published in the last three months. This is well above the long-term trend and on par with 2022, which was also a record year in terms of recency.

The rest are mostly titles that I had somehow missed when they came out ago a couple of years back. The oldest of these not-really-new titles are Uenal’s 2016 study of Islamophobia, and two excellent articles from 2017 by Wagner/Meyer and by Harteveld & friends, respectively, that were not yet in the bibliography.

Publication yearn
2023114
202457
202224
202110
20204
20153
20192
20172
20181
20161
Publication years for 222 additions to the bibliography

The recent and ongoing expansion of the field becomes visible once one looks at the publication years of all titles in the bibliography: 2023 was (so far) the most productive year of the subfield, in which nearly 10 per cent(!!!) of all titles in the database were published.

And the output during the first three months of 2024 (which, admittedly, includes some online first publications that were finally assigned to an issue) is already equal to that of 2017 and bigger than that of any year before 2015.

212 of the 222 new entries are journal articles. Government and Opposition does even better than in recent years and tops the list (jointly with last year’s and long-run champion Party Politics). European Political Science Review has another unusually good year, which confirms my impression that right now, it is one of the hottest journals for this kind of research.

In the long run, West European Politics and European Journal of Political Research are the most important journals with 75 titles each, which means that the gap between WEP and EJPR that seemed to be widening just last year has now closed. Good for EJPR, and well deserved for WEP (who rejected two topical manuscripts of mine over the last 18 months). With 60 titles, Party Politics comes third (or is it second in this context?).

Journaln
Government and Opposition11
Party Politics11
European Journal of Political Research10
Electoral Studies9
European Political Science Review9
American Political Science Review8
West European Politics8
Journal of Contemporary European Studies7
Journal of European Public Policy7
Political Studies6
The most important journals for research on the radical right in 2024

What is the new research on the radical right about, exactly?

Like in previous year, I have tried to create a visualisation (based on titles and abstracts) that shows what this new research is about. Like in previous years, party/parties, attitudes, immigration, and Europe are amongst the most important topics, which should not come as a surprise. But “study” is less important than in 2023, which probably reflects just a passing fad in crafting article titles. What I find distinctly odd is that Germany is so much more prominent than Italy, the Netherlands, and Spain. And two of last year’s newcomers, “pandemic” and “Covid”, are fading into the background.

Topics in recent research on the radical right

Who wrote this stuff?

Most authors have written one or two titles that appear in the new release, but 12 appear to have been particularly busy. However, that impression is a bit misleading: in some cases, I had missed a handful of publications by a given colleague and have no finally rectified that oversight.

AuthorTitles
Sabine Volk8
Manès Weisskircher6
Marta Lorimer5
Anna-Sophie Heinze4
Sofia Ammassari4
Benjamin Moffitt3
Caterina Froio3
Cristóbal Rovira-Kaltwasser3
Daphne Halikiopoulou3
Jakub Wondreys3
Marianna Griffini3
Mattia Zulianello3
Most frequent author names in 2024

Which brings me to a more general point: if you know of research that would fit into the bibliography, please tell me about it. And self-nominations are totally fine.

(Assumed) gender of radical right researchers

For several years running, I have tried to algorithmically infer the gender of unique author names. This works reasonably well for European names, although both my old friend Andrea Pirro and my good self routinely get flagged up as female. For non-European names, the algorithm is mostly useless. This year, there are 401 unique names. I have manually fixed the algorithmic problems for some well-known cases/persons. There may be others who were misclassified, and I have left 9 instances were the algorithm and I were undecided as missing (coloured black in the graph).

260 names are classified as male, and 132 as female, which amounts to a slightly lower ratio than last year (34 vs 37 per cent). This does not account for the number of publications a person is involved in, and some female colleagues are heavy hitters (see the table above). Still, the dominance of MICHAEL is something to behold.

Given names of authors, coloured by assumed gender

Now show us the latest titles in radical right research

Here is a full list of all that is new in the bibliography. Click here to download/import these new titles into your reference management software.

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