What we are reading: Do PRR Parties Improve Representation?

Something good in everything? Could radical right-wing populism be a (whispers) good thing? Of course it all depends on what we mean by “good”. Backlund and Jungar have a modest proposal: they suggest that radical right success could improve the representation of policy preferences in parliament. Using data from both expert and voter surveys in…

What we are reading: Gender and the Radical Right Vote

Why are women (mostly) immune to the radical right? It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a good brain is rarely in want of a male-dominated, chauvinist, sexist radical right party. Or something along these lines. Austen aside, for most radical right parties in (Western) Europe, the male-to-female ratio in their…

Inglehart, Maaßen, Le Pen: two links I liked & one that makes me sad

Inglehart, Maaßen, Le Pen: two links I liked & one that makes me sad 1

I’m sad to hear that Ronald Inglehart has died. Hero worshipping is worse than useless, and great man/woman theories are just very bad sociology of knowledge. Having said that, Inglehart had an impact on the field of comparative political sociology that is hard to overestimate. He was enormously productive, and his work is cited far…

What we are reading: Radical Right voters’ motives in Eastern and Western Europe

Is anti-immigration sentiment behind the radical right vote in all of Europe? It’s been a mere three decades since 1990, or as we old-timers are prone to say, a generation. But for some (cough) Europeanists, the CEE countries are still either terra incognita or just an extension of their western counterparts. While much of the…

What we are reading: populism, identity, and mobilisation

Everyone and their grandfather are worried about (right-wing) populism, filter bubbles, frames, and their effects on western publics. But do they actually work? This large team ran an experiment in many European countries to find out. You will be shocked when you see hypothesis #7! Bos, L., Schemer, C., Corbu, N., Hameleers, M., Andreadis, I.,…