What has salience to do with it? In the third week of my reading class, we read this recent paper Dennison, J. (2020). How issue salience explains the rise of the populist right in western europe. International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 32(3), 397–420. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/ijpor/edz022 The author argues that various explanations for radical right support are all…
In the second week of my reading class, we had a go at this one. Whiteley, P., Larsen, E., Goodwin, M., & Clarke, H. (2019). Party activism in the populist radical right: the case of the uk independence party. Party Politics, online first. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354068819880142 Big guns, and Paul Whiteley was the friendliest next-door (office) neighbour I could wish for…
What is this about? Every long, dark, depressing winter term (mid-October to mid-February, thank you very much), I run a reading class for/with my MA students. The rules are simple: I pick a broad topic (in this year’s instance: participation), then I select 12-14 peer-reviewed articles that have been published over the last 20 months…
There is this journalist in Slovakia who occasionally sends me questions about the Radical Right and or Germany. It’s one of these wonderful relationships that the internet makes possible: we have never met in person, never even spoken on the phone, but for years we have been swapping messages and ideas. On the occasion of the 30th…
Men are more positive about (some) reproductive science and technology than women Here is a by-catch finding from my recent article on the micro-foundations of the two-worlds theory of moral policy (full article, ungated). In the article, I look at the effect of a) party identification, b) religiosity, and c) political secularism (a desire for the separation…
Social Identity Theory is a prominent account of intergroup hostility and hence super interesting for political scientist. Groundbreaking work in this field was carried out by Henri Tajfel, who ran fascinating experiments back in the 1960s and 70s. Today, many of these would go nowhere near an IRB.
If you have 19 minutes to spare, this podcast delivers both a vignette of Tajfel’s life and a useful primer of Social Identity Theory ? ?
Rupert Brown on Henri Tajfel #socialScienceBites
I was always lousy with Theory™. I still am lousy, but thankfully, it does not matter so much anymore. To be fair, I’m OK with empirical theories. It’s the big ideas stuff that throws me. There was a Theorist™ on my PhD committee, but he seemed to be an OK geezer. Unfortunately, he and my…
Back in the mist of time that would eventually coalesce into my memories of the 1990s, I met a fellow PhD-er at a summer school. She had just returned to the fatherland after doing an MA in the UK and found re-integration into German Political Science rather difficult. The toughest bit, according to her, was…
What? I’m currently working on a paper that looks into the role that Germany’s eastern states (aka “the new Länder”, the ex-GDR …) played for the breakthrough and the consolidation of the “Alternative for Germany” party. This figure shows support for the AfD from 2013 to 2020. The graph is a teeny-weeny bit busy, so…
On May the 8th 1945, the Wehrmacht surrendered, bringing the war in Europe and the terror reign of the Nazis to an end.1 40 years later, then-president Richard von Weizsäcker, himself a former officer of the Wehrmacht and a scion of the same Prussian gentry that for centuries has supplied the army with cadets, kicked…