kai arzheimer

The Far Right Bibliography: the pandemic (aka spring 2020) update

What bibliography?

The Eclectic, Erratic Bibliography on the Extreme Right (in (Western) Europe)™ is a collection of references on far right parties & their voters. Most of the titles fall in to the field of Political Science (broadly defined), but some contributions from related disciplines (most notably sociology, psychology, and economy) are included, too. You a free to browse the bibliography, download it (most reference software can import this format), curse it – whatever floats your boat. If you are aware of any titles that should be in the bibliography, please send me the reference (and the PDF if you have it).

(Lazy? Just watch it)

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What is new?

Since November 2019, I have added 49 new titles to the bibliography. This brings the total number of entries to 955. Most of the new titles are fairly recent and were only published in the last couple of years or so.

Publication year n
2019 28
2020 17
2018 2
2013 1
2017 1

This contributes to an interesting phenomenon: almost 20 per cent of the titles in the bibliography (which has existed in one form or another for more than two decades) were published after 2017. I might get better at spotting stuff, people might be more willing to send me pointers to their work, or (this my hunch) the literature is exploding.

Almost all (48) of them are articles that were published in (peer-reviewed) journals. This is in line with the bibliography’s existing bias towards articles: since the early 2000s, articles are outpacing any other type of publication.

I’m not sure if this reflects my personal reading habits or a more general shift in publication practices. Here are the outlets in which the 48 articles were published. Again, this is broadly in line with past patterns.

Journal n
European Journal of Political Research 4
Party Politics 4
Political Psychology 4
West European Politics 4
Nations and Nationalism 3
Social Science Quarterly 3
Electoral Studies 2
Journal of European Public Policy 2
Politics 2
Politische Vierteljahresschrift 2
Comparative European Politics 1
Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences 1
European Journal of Personality 1
European Political Science 1
French Politics 1
German Politics 1
Government and Opposition 1
International Journal of Public Opinion Research 1
Journal of Democracy 1
Patterns of Prejudice 1
Polish Political Science Review 1
Political Analysis 1
Political Behavior 1
Political Geography 1
Political Studies 1
Scandinavian Political Studies 1
SSRN Electronic Journal 1
The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 1

What are they writing about?

I made a quick word cloud from the titles and abstracts. Click on the image for a bigger and mildly interactive version. Like in previous updates, the adjective “radical” stands out, whereas “extreme” and is mentioned only once. This neatly reflects the influence of Cas Mudde’s typology, but also the realities of West European party politics, where openly anti-democratic ideas are not popular with voters.

Click on the image to open a bigger and slightly more interactive version in a new tab

Populist(s) and populism are just as, well, popular. The same goes for party/parties. Some stemming would have made this more easily visible, but stems look really ugly in a word cloud (“the pie chart of text analysis” – I know). Europe, western, support, voting, immigration, and national are runners up. Pie chart or not, this makes it clear that the new entries contribute to the bibliography’s existing focus/bias (delete as appropriate) on .

 

Who is writing all these articles?

Last time ’round, the answer to that question was a resounding and depressing “Michael”. This time, it is an equally resounding/depressing “Christian”.

Only 29 of the 104 unique authors of the new crop are female, which amounts to 28 per cent. This has been bugging me for a long time, so I decided to have a look at the bigger picture, i.e. the 1990-2020 period that includes 97 per cent of all titles.

Because the number of authors is large, I used an algorithm that relies on US Social Security Administration baby name data to assign gender probabilities to names. This is not perfect and tends to overestimate the share of female authors, at least in a largely European context (looking at you, Andrea, Nicola, Matti, and even Reinhold (?)). I also decided to count each publication in which an author was involved in a given year as a case, i.e. I factored in the number of publications.

The share varies considerably from year to year, so I added a lowess smoother. The results suggests a very slow but appreciable upward trend. However, the data also show that there was a period in the late 1990s/early 2000s, when the share of female authors was higher than it was over the last decade or so. This resonates with Sarah de Lange’s description of a worrying development in the field. So, if you are female, please send me your work on right-wing radicalism. The men do it. All. The. Time.

Show us the goods

These are all the new titles in their full glory. Click here to download/import them into your reference manager software.

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