36 years of research on the Front National, the Le Pens, & their voters

The year is 2022. For the third time, a Le Pen is proceeding to the run-off for the French presidency. And unlike 2002 (when her father stood) and 2017, Marine Le Pen has a chance to win this time. Without doubt, a Le Pen presidency would upend French, European, and even global politics. This is…

Video: local living conditions, anti-immigrant sentiment, and radical right voting

local living conditions and radical right voting

How do people in cities & the countryside react to the presence or absence of immigrants? How does local decline further radical right mobilisation? Are immigrants becoming convenient scapegoats for developments that have nothing to do with them?

Or does the daily interaction between immigrants and the native population foster positive contacts that lead to pro-immigration attitudes? And what role do self-selection of liberal-minded individuals into multi-cultural neighbourhoods on the one hand and “white flight” on the other play?

These are (I think) fascinating questions that have occupied me for a long time. Thanks to my fantastic colleagues in the SCoRE project, we are a bit closer to answering them. Tomorrow, we’ll present first findings and a couple of policy recommendations at an EPC event in Brussels. If you can’t/couldn’t make it to Belgium, watch this short video and read either the full policy brief or the executive summary.

Video: the radical right & 4 critical elections in Western Europe in 2017

AfD results in 2017 federal election in Germany (map of districts)

As (West) European election years go, 2017 was quite something. The French party system changed beyond recognition. The radical right entered Germany’s national parliament for the first time. UKIP was wiped out, but May still managed to lose a comfortable majority. And very high fragmentation resulted in a coalition that looks improbable even by Dutch standards.

SCoRE is our multinational project that explores the link between local and regional living conditions on the one hand and radical right attitudes and behaviours in these four countries on the other. Sometimes, serendipity is really a thing. Because we had our individual-level data collection scheduled for this year anyway, we gained some unique insights into all four big Western European elections of 2017.

Accordingly, my colleagues have written up reports for France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK, complete with beautiful maps. Who does not like maps?

But perhaps you’re pressed for time or not sure if you really want to read four (fairly short) reports? With the European Parliamentary elections on the horizon, I made a short explainer/teaser video about them to bring you up to speed in just over two minutes. I have a hunch that afterwards, you will want to read all four pieces.

Elections in Europe in 2017: four reports

Elections in Europe: great expectations. [caption id="attachment_28012" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Evans & Ivaldi, SCoRE project[/caption] 2017 was a year of high-profile national elections in Europe, in which the Radical Right was expected to do particularly well. Balanced and neutral as ever, the Express claimed that the votes in France, Germany, and the Netherlands could DESTROY…

Analysing Bias in French Pre-Election Surveys with surveybias for Stata (example 1/3)

In a recent publication (Arzheimer & Evans 2014), we propose a new multinomial measure B for bias in opinion surveys. We also supply a suite of ado files for Stata, surveybias, which plugs into Stata’s framework for estimation programs and provides estimates for this and other measures along with their standard errors. This is the first instalment in a mini series of posts that show how our commands can be used with real-world data. Here, we analyse the quality of a single French pre-election poll.