Does cross-cutting exposure help or hinder participation? Somewhat predictably, I fell off the seminar-blogging wagon shortly after the break. But hey, this is a digital semester, so we have actual archived notes of our virtual meetings. One of the first texts we read in the new year was this one: a specimen of the meta-analytic…
How it started It’s no secret that Mainz is a carnival hot spot. Shrove Monday, the day of the biggest parade and the most frantic celebrations, is a de facto public holiday in the city. But the de facto bit is important here: the city can’t make it a proper holiday, yet nobody who can possibly avoid it…
Everyone and their grandfather are worried about (right-wing) populism, filter bubbles, frames, and their effects on western publics. But do they actually work? This large team ran an experiment in many European countries to find out. You will be shocked when you see hypothesis #7! Bos, L., Schemer, C., Corbu, N., Hameleers, M., Andreadis, I.,…
Why are city folk more tolerant? In the olden days, people claimed that city air would set you free. In our times, that may not be true in a strict sense (hey, surveillance capitalism!), but people living in big cities are certainly much more relaxed about many things, including immigration. Is this a result of…
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