Tag: europe

4 links I liked: the “Manosphere”, LaRouche, the EP elections & survivorship bias

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4 links I liked: the

An important part of my job is dealing with stuff that is both unpleasant and weird (no, I’m not talking about teaching evaluations). Much of what goes on in far-right politics these days used to be called “the lunatic fringe” but has stealthily moved into the political mainstream. The “manosphere”, a network of unabashedly anti-feminist (or rather anti-female) sites and online communities is fringe even by these standards. But that may change: the HuffPost has an interesting piece about the role of the UK anti-feminist movement within the wider far-right.

Speaking of fringe: I’m old enough to remember that the “Patrioten für Deutschland” (Patriots for Germany) stood in national elections in the late 1980s. They demanded a “new Renaissance” (sounded alright then) and had a manifesto that was manifestly bonkers. The party was part of the “global LaRouche movement”. Apparently their successor party still exists, and they are still deeply rooted within the mad-hatter sector of the political spectrum. And they continue to be guided by one Helga Zepp-LaRouche, wife of Lyndon LaRouche. The latter has died (“how was he still around???”), but his toxic legacy lives on.

Politico predicts “big wins” for the “right wing” in the upcoming EP elections, complete with a picture of Salvini and Le Pen smiling like newlyweds at the reception. Once you read the article, you realise that they actually predict losses for the Socialists/Social Democrats, good times for ALDE, and a mixed bag for Salvini, Le Pen and their ilk. But it is still an interesting article.

What is survivorship bias? Glad you asked, because this is my excuse for linking to yet another wonderful xkcd cartoon

survivorship_bias.png

Look Mom, no Brexit links this week!

The rise of right-wing populist and radical groups in Europe. Is history repeating itself?

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Back in March 2018, the Montreal Holocaust Museum invited me to an expert panel that they were organising as part of their Action Week against Racism. The topic: the resurgence of aggressive right-wing politics in Europe. Speaking on this issue, at this institution, was both poignant and humbling. Here are my slides.

Interview with Diário de Notícias on the Nationalist International (or not)

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Does the European Radical Right present a united front vis-a-vis the European Union, and is there a Trump effect that could further the cause of the Radical Right in Europe? I don’t think so (and here is an automated English translation).

UE debaixo de fogo dentro de casa no ano do ″vai ou racha″
UE debaixo de fogo dentro de casa no ano do ″vai ou racha″

São cada vez mais os dirigentes políticos que lutam contra a União Europeia e os partidos anti-integração estão cada vez mais fortes nas sondagens

DN DN

Interview with Deutsche Welle on the Danish People’s Party & the New Populist Alliance

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Interview mit der Deutschen Welle zur Einordnung der Dänischen Volkspartei und deren Rolle in einem möglichen Verbund europäischer Rechtsparteien.

Denmark regions label
Foter.com / CC BY-SA

Interview with Deutsche Welle on the Danish People’s Party and their potential role within an alliance of right-wing populist parties in Europe.

European Social Survey Multilevel Data

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Like social networks, multilevel data structures are everywhere once you start thinking about it. People live in neighbourhoods, neighbourhoods are nested in municipalities, which make up provinces – well, you get the picture. Even if we have no substantive interest in their effects, it often makes sense to control for structures in our data to get more realistic standard errors.

Now the good folks over at the European Social Survey have reacted and spent the Descartes Prize money on compiling multilevel information and merging them with their own data. So far, the selection is a little bit disappointing in some respects. Homicide rates, for instance, are reported on the national level only. But there are some pleasant surprises (I guess due to Eurostat, who collect such things): We get unemployment, GDP growth and even student numbers at the NUTS-3 level. Since you asked, NUTS is the Nomenclature of (subnational) Territory, and level 3 is the lowest level for which comparative data are normally published.

Regrettably, the size and number of level 3 units is not necessarily comparable across countries: For Germany, level 3 corresponds to about 400 local government districts, while France is divided into 96 European Departments. But if you need to combine top-notch survey data with small(ish) regional data, it’s a start, and not a bad one.

Free historical maps of Germany and Europe

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It is mildly embarrassing to come across a great resource that is hosted within one’s own institution by accident (read: google). Unwittingly googling one’s own publications is definitively worse, but that is not the point. Nonetheless, I was happy to stumble upon the Institute of European History’s digital map server when I needed to illustrate my point about territorial cleavages in Germany. The site has a slightly dusty look and uses gifs for previews, but the licence is more than generous and the coverage and quality are impressive. If you ever need a map of Hessen-Kassel’s administrative structures in 1821, look no further. The only thing that is missing (as far as I can tell) are shapefiles, but if you are serious about GIS applications, you can convert/georeference the postscript files. For lecture slides, the gifs should suffice anyway.

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

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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 a large chunk from Gilles Ivaldi’s chapter), it’s a bit of a mixed bag, but I like the idea of bringing together  contributions on Eastern and Western Europe and dealing with multiple facets of the right (parties, movements, voters, ‘culture’). While I’m particularly partial to the chapters by Ivaldi and de Lange, which are on matters close to my own research interests,  Heß-Meining’s piece on Right-Wing Esotericism stands out for the sheer weirdness of its subject: Hitler’s hideout in the Arctic and Al Gore the Vampire, you name it. So if you’re looking for a last-minute Christmas present for this XR-head stoner uncle of yours …  just kidding of course.

As an aside, it’s remarkable that this book was published in English. The volume as well as the conference on which it is based were sponsored by French and German institutions. A few years ago, that would have meant a bilingual conference and publication. Outside Luxembourg, what is the number of scholars working in the field who could have actively participated in the conference? And how much larger would have been the number of potential readers? Individually and collectively, French and German political science might still be too big to fail for the time being, but it’s good to see that we as a discipline chose relevance. Occasionally.

To celebrate this moment of pre-Christmas clarity, here’s the author’s version of my chapter

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

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In my pet model, the salience of issues such as immigration or national identiy in the manifestos of established parties

Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react
Random shock to salience - support cannot be bothered to react

makes a vote for the extreme right/radical right much more likely. There is, however, a potential problem with this argument: if radical right support is stable in the medium term, and if other parties react to past successes for the radical right by modifying their manifestos, this relationship might be spurious. In my paper for the ECPR conference at Potsdam, I use a time-series model  to address this problem: I estimate a Vector Auto Regression (VAR) of radical right support and issue salience in France (while controlling for immigration and unemployment). As it turns out, salience is independent of previous radical right success. This finding provides some support for my original argument, though the analysis  preliminary and restricted to France (at the moment).

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