I’ve just finished a review of Tim Spier’s new book on the electorates of the Western European populist right (Modernisierungsverlierer: Die Wählerschaft rechtspopulistischer Parteien in Westeuropa (in German))
One particularly annoying aspect of doing reviews for learned journals is that assignments tend to arrive in clusters. Six months ago, I found myself in a bit of a pickle, with loads and loads of requests arriving within a short time. And just five weeks ago, another volley of invitations to review hit my mailbox…
As predicted yesterday, the nuclear disaster in Japan is having a profound impact on something as trivial as three state election campaigns in Germany, more than 9000 kilometres away. Roughly 70 per cent of the population believe that an incident on the scale of the Japanese catastrophe could happen in Germany, too. The Federal Government…
[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Image via Wikipedia"][/caption] It’s amazing: Just 36 hours after the horrible earth quake in Japan, 60000 people are demonstrating in Swabia – against nuclear energy. While we do not know whether the Japanese plants are actually in meltdown, for the German liberal-conservative coalition, this is certainly the Most Credible Accident. One…
In the olden days, the world was simple. The average extreme right party was strictly socially conservative, to say the least. Abortion and homosexuality were considered sinful, mostly so because both practices deprived the fatherland of future soldiers and potential mothers of even more soldiers. So sex was supposed to be intramarital and had one…
The story has now been picked up by just about every news outlet on the planet: A German law professor was supposed to review a monograph on European constitutional law for a learned journal. He soon discovered that various pages were not properly referenced, to says the least. The twist: This monograph is based on…
The recent DVU/NPD merger has been successfully challenged in court
If this post’s title does make any sense to you, chances are that you are one of us anoraks who had a brilliant weekend of extreme right spotting. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen stepped down as leader of the Front National, just under 40 years after he founded the party. He is succeeded by his…
Recently, the good folks over at the Exzellenzcluster (that’s German new-speak, folks!) Trier invited me over for a talk on our “networks in political science” project (which is not dead, just moving very slowly). Since this is multimedia month, they captured my voice and re-synched it with the presentation. Spooky stuff: all silly jokes, every…
You couldn’t make up this extract from a student’s essay a friend just sent me: If the state allows one to free to earn more money he will do so regardless of others positions in society as human nature has a constant demand for more. This will inevitably lead to the notion of luxury goods,…