Category: Political Science

Clearly defined concepts are overrated. The strange case of European Radical Right Studies

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Free Book Chapter

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…

Quick hit: personality is back in politics

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Quick hit: personality is back in politics 2

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)…

Sweden: (some) thoughts and (no) prayers

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Sweden: (some) thoughts and (no) prayers 3

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,…

The CSU’s hard line towards refugees/immigrants is hardly new

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Hey twitter, the CSU’s current anti-refugee line may be inspired by rise of AfD and upcoming elections, but it is hardly new. Lubbers et al. 2002 report (for the 1990s) that the CSU was responsible for Germany having one of the most restrictive “anti-immigrant climates” in Western Europe, that the CSU they were the most…

Update: How the AfD ditched Euroscepticism and embraced immigration, in one picture

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Update February 5, 2018

In March 2017, I posted a graph which shows how the AfD’s Facebook posts moved away from euroscepticism and Greece-bashing towards immigration and Islamophobia.

This research on the AfD has now been published as part of a larger project.

But trends can change, and local regression smoothers have a habit of behaving strangely at the borders. So I downloaded another year’s worth of Facebook posts and reran the scripts:

Update: How the AfD ditched Euroscepticism and embraced immigration, in one picture 6

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the new graph confirms for 2017 what we have seen for 2016: Muslims and immigrants are all the rage, whereas the Euro crisis is so 2014. I leave the old graph/post below as is for comparison.

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Elections in Europe in 2017: four reports

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Elections in Europe: great expectations. [caption id="attachment_28012" align="alignright" width="300"] Source: Evans & Ivaldi, SCoRE project[/caption] 2017 was a year of high-profile national elections in Europe, in which the Radical Right was expected to do particularly well. Balanced and neutral as ever, the Express claimed that the votes in France, Germany, and the Netherlands could DESTROY…