Die Wähler der Extremen Rechten 1980-2002

Die Wähler der Extremen Rechten 1980-2002 1

My monograph on the Extreme Right vote in Western Europe covers the EU-15 states plus Norway and Switzerland from 1980 to 2003 [in German]
Seit den frühen 1980er Jahren haben sich die Parteien der Extremen Rechten – manchmal auch als Radikale Rechte, Neue Rechte oder Populistische Rechte bezeichnet – als neue Parteienfamilie in Westeuropa etabliert. Fast jeder der alten EU-Mitgliedsstaaten sowie Norwegen und die Schweiz mußte sich in diesem Zeitraum mit einer oder mehreren dieser Parteien auseinandersetzen, deren Verhältnis zur liberalen Demokratie häufig als problematisch erscheint. Dieses Buch untersucht die Wählerschaft dieser Parteien. Ein Schwerpunkt liegt dabei auf dem Zusammenspiel von Mikro- und Makro-Faktoren, das das Wahlverhalten zugunsten dieser Parteien erklären kann.

Something old, something new, something borrowed, something true? A comment on Lister’s ‘Institutions, Inequality and Social Norms: Explaining Variations in Participation’

Michael Lister makes a useful contribution to the discussion on aggregate variables that foster or depress turnout by drawing attention to societal factors, but his analysis is fraught with methodological problems. While his article builds on an interesting theoretical argument about the impact of institutions on attitudes, his claims about causal relationships are not backed by data. There is no rationale for the selection of countries, and most explanatory variables are actually constant within countries. The specification of the model is problematic in many ways. A careful re-analysis shows that the t-values reported in Lister’s article are far too large, while the estimates are unstable and dependent on the selection of observations. Moreover, the effects are trivial in terms of their political implications. There is no robust evidence for a universal, politically relevant relationship between inequality and turnout.

Political Efficacy

Political Efficacy is a term that refers to the “the feeling that individual political action does have, or can have, an impact upon the political process, i.e. that it is worth while to perform one’s civic duties” (Campbell/Gurin/Miller 1954: 187). Like with many important concepts in the field of political communication and sociology, its origins…

Voter Behaviour

Between the early 1940s and the late 1960s, four basic models of voter behavior have been proposed on which almost all studies of electoral behavior draw. These models describe how humans react to environmental factors and choose between different courses of action. Homo sociologicus (more or less implicitly) forms the basis of the approaches to voting behavior laid out in the first three parts of this entry. In contrast rational voter theory explicitly invokes homo oeconomicus through deductive reasoning. A closer examination reveals, however, that these seemingly very different approaches are in fact complementary and can be regarded as aspects of an overarching model. In the past few years this line of reasoning has become increasingly present both in social-psychological as well as rational choice writings.