year: 2009

Contextual Factors and the Extreme Right Vote in Western Europe, 1980-2002

Why is support for the Extreme Right unstable over time and uneven across countries? This study covers the joint effect of micro and macro factors on the Extreme Right vote in all EU-15 countries plus Switzerland and Norway from 1980 to 2002. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if individual and contextual variables are controlled for.

Christian Religiosity and Voting for West European Radical Right Parties

This article examines the relationship between Christian religiosity and the support for radical right parties in Western Europe. Drawing on theories of electoral choice and on socio-psychological literature largely ignored by scholars of electoral behaviour, it suggests and tests a number of competing hypotheses. The findings demonstrate that while religiosity has few direct effects, and while religious people are neither more nor less hostile towards ethnic minorities and thereby neither more nor less prone to vote for a radical right party, they are not ‘available’ to these parties because they are still firmly attached to Christian Democratic or conservative parties. However, given increasing de-alignment, this ‘vaccine effect’ is likely to become weaker with time.

Protest, Neo-Liberalism or Anti-Immigrant Sentiment: What Motivates the Voters of the Extreme Right in Western Europe?

Over the last three decades, the parties of the “Extreme”, “Radical” or “Populist” Right have become a political staple in Western Europe. However, comparative evidence on the motives of their voters is relatively scarce. This article assesses the empirical effects of the most prominent alleged motivational factors “pure” (i.e. performance related) protest, anti-immigrant sentiment, and neo-liberal economic preferences – on the extreme right vote while controlling for a whole host of background variables. While protest and neo-liberalism have no statistically significant impact whatsoever, immigrant sentiment plays a crucial role in all countries but Italy. Its effect is moderated, however, by general ideological preferences and party identification. Consequentially, comparative electoral research should focus on the circumstances under which immigration is politicised.

Isoliert oder gut vernetzt? Eine vergleichende Exploration der Publikationspraxis in der PVS

Citations and co-publications are one important indicator of
scientific communication and collaboration. By studying patterns of
citation and co-publication in four major European Political Science
journals (BJPS, PS, PVS and ÃOEZP), we demonstrate that compared to the
conduits of communication in the sciences, these networks are rather
sparse. British Political Science, however, is clearly less fragmented
than its German speaking counterpart.

How (not) to Operationalise Subnational Political Opportunity Structures

Kestilä and Söderlund (2007) examine the impact of subnational political opportunity structures on the success of the radical right and argue that such an approach can control for a wider range of factors and provide more reliable results than cross-national analyses. The present article disputes this claim on theoretical, conceptual and methodological grounds and demonstrates that their empirical findings are spurious.