Terminology matters for science. If people use different words for the same thing, or even worse, the same word for different things, scientific communication turns into a dialogue of the deaf. European Radical Right Studies are a field where this is potentially a big problem: we use labels like “New”, “Populist”, “Radical”, “Extreme” or even…
Yesterday, Andre Poggenburg, formerly the AfD’s head honcho in Saxony-Anhalt announced that he had left the AfD and launched a new party further to the right: the “Awakening of German Patriots”. Before his fall from grace, Poggenburg was one of the more visible members of the party’s ultra-nationalist “völkisch” wing, which is particularly strong in…
Putsch in the AfD! This morning, I woke up to the news that Andre Poggenburg, former leader of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt and former chair of the AfD’s delegation in the state parliament is now also a former member of the AfD. And thanks to @TheDanHough, I quickly learned that he has already set up…
Topic modelling does not work well for (my) research paper abstracts The Radical Right Research Robot is a fun side project whose life began exactly one year ago. The Robot exists to promote the very large body of knowledge on Radical Right parties and their voters that social scientists have accumulated over decades. At its…
A year ago, I wrote a slightly maudlin blog about the good and the not-so-good reasons for solo-blogging in this time and age. Good reasons or not, I kept up the good work with 35 blogs in 2018. That is a bit less than my long-term annual average, but Chapeau to my good self nonetheless.…
Christmas comes early this year for political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and anyone else interested in research on the Extreme Right/Radical Right: the winter 2018 edition of the Extreme Right Bibliography is here. The latest iteration brings the total to 808 titles: 539 journal articles, 102 monographs, and 167 chapters. Since the April edition, there…
Reprise: The co-citation network in European Radical Right studies In the last post, I tried to reconstruct the co-citation network in European Radical Right studies and ended up with this neat graph. [caption id="attachment_28138" align="alignnone" width="907"] Co-citations within top 20 titles in Extreme / Radical Right studies[/caption] The titles are arranged in groups, with the…
Die neue AfD Bundestagsfraktion hat in ihrem ersten Jahr etliche Gesetzesinitiativen vorgelegt und eine größere Zahl parlamentarischer Anfragen gestartet. Dabei geht es fast unabhängig vom Anlaß allerdings immer nur um ein Thema: Migration. Dietmar Neuerer vom Handelsblatt hat mit dem Berliner Kollegen Oskar Niedermayer und mir darüber gesprochen, ob das Verhalten der Parlamentsneulinge ungewöhnlich ist…
Research question For a long time, people working in the field of European Radical Right Studies could not even agree on a common name for the thing that they were researching. Should it be the Extreme Right, the Radical Right, or what? Utterly unimpressed by this fact, I argue in a in-press contribution that this…
What (is) right? These days, the (Populist) Radical Right is all the rage. But when I started out as a young Padawan an unspecified number of decades ago, we were working on the Extreme Right as a matter of course. A few years down the line, a dear co-author asked me whether we should switch…