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…
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…
Clearly defined concepts are certainly necessary for any kind of scientific progress, right? Who could possibly disagree with that? Yes, you guessed right: me, your friendly neighbourhood contrarian, begs to differ. In a forthcoming chapter, I argue that conceptual confusion has at least not hampered progress in one field close to my heart: European Radical…
[caption id="attachment_28116" align="alignleft" width="797"] European Integration and identity politics, ca 2000[/caption] Lauren McLaren, writing in 2002, using data from 47.1 Eurobarometer conducted in 1997. As they say: nothing new under the sun
90 minutes after closing time, the exit polls and models are converging on a result for the AfD of about 11 per cent. The party has entered the 15th of 16 state parliament and is about to enter the final one (Hesse) in two weeks’ time. Predictably, the party is presenting this as a huge…
Probably it’s never been away. Equally probably, I’m overgeneralising from personal experience (can you see what I’m doing here?): within less than 48 hours: I heard this podcast featuring the excellent John Hibbing (the research discussed in the show was published a while ago) on brain differences and political preferences (red brain / blue brain)…
The other day, an American journalist wanted to talk about the Sweden Democrat’s role in the upcoming Swedish election. Being no country specialist, I tried to deflect the request, but he sent me some more specific questions anyway, which I tried to answer to the best of my abilities. Unsurprisingly, I provided too much detail,…