Meanwhile in Germany: The Great Coalition Treaty Vote

SPD votes on the coalition agreement It’ another slow week for German politics, what with the Mandela Memorial, near-civil war in Thailand, the standoff in Ukraine and the South Korean/Japanese Chinese skirmishes. BUT: a small-scale CDU party conference of some 180 delegates has approved unanimously of the CDU/CSU/SPD agreement (a ‘Coalition Treaty’ in German parlance,…

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:…

Finally: New book on the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002

It’s almost unbelievable: after some six months of communication problems with the publishers, my recent book on the extreme right vote in Western Europe since the 1980s is finally out and ready for you to order and read (qualification: if you read German). If you don’t read German, you might still be interested in a…