In this, your friendly neighborhood economist explains how extortion can reach a nice, efficient equilibrium where everyone is reasonably happy. Fascinating stuff.
Kurtis Minder finds the cat-and-mouse energy of outsmarting criminal syndicates deeply satisfying, Rachel Monroe writes.
Why are women (mostly) immune to the radical right? It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a woman in possession of a good brain is rarely in want of a male-dominated, chauvinist, sexist radical right party. Or something along these lines. Austen aside, for most radical right parties in (Western) Europe, the male-to-female ratio in their…
Computer assisted surveillance is baked into the design of our apps and devices. Sometimes its results are mildly funny.
Sunday afternoon in Germany is the perfect time for contemplation, because there is absolutely nothing else to do. If you want to worry about catastrophic events slightly further in the future than climate change, listen to this wonderful episode of Big Picture Science about the end of everything 😱
Filip Vostal thinks that slow scholarship is basically Goop for the academy. I think he is onto something
(Impact of Social Sciences)For several years the slow scholarship movement has gathered an international following in advocating for a more conscientious slower form of academic work. Arguing against this blanket rejection o…
Our recent article has been cited a lot (by local standards), and the ungated pre-print is still available.
I’m sad to hear that Ronald Inglehart has died. Hero worshipping is worse than useless, and great man/woman theories are just very bad sociology of knowledge. Having said that, Inglehart had an impact on the field of comparative political sociology that is hard to overestimate. He was enormously productive, and his work is cited far…
Is anti-immigration sentiment behind the radical right vote in all of Europe? It’s been a mere three decades since 1990, or as we old-timers are prone to say, a generation. But for some (cough) Europeanists, the CEE countries are still either terra incognita or just an extension of their western counterparts. While much of the…
The Radical Right bibliography has been updated. As of April 2021, it lists more than a thousand titles on radical right parties and their supporters. Click here to see what’s new.
What we are reading: Corruption performance voting Do voters punish government parties for high levels of corruption? Performance voting is a generalisation of economic voting: the idea that voters governments punish/reward for good/bad, well, performance. Low levels of systemic corruption are both an aspect and a precondition for a polity’s performance, so studying how voters’…