Category: Political Science

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 3

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…

The rise of right-wing populist and radical groups in Europe. Is history repeating itself?

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Back in March 2018, the Montreal Holocaust Museum invited me to an expert panel that they were organising as part of their Action Week against Racism. The topic: the resurgence of aggressive right-wing politics in Europe. Speaking on this issue, at this institution, was both poignant and humbling. Here are my slides. [slideshare id=93881200&doc=arzheimer-montreal-180414224430]

A twitterbot for the Extreme Right Bibliography

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I’m still collecting references for the next iteration of the Extreme Right Bibliography (but I am almost there. Honest to God. Really). Meanwhile, while I should have probably been doing other things, I’ve brushed up my fairly rudimentary R skills and taught myself how to write a similarly rudimentary twitterbot. If you are reading this,…

Three and a half Special Issues on (Right-Wing) populism. And then two more

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that Political Science suffers from generational cycles of collective amnesia. For obvious reasons, (right-wing) populism is a hot topic again, and mature colleagues (cough) may bemoan the fact that they have seen it all before (at least twice). Let them moan. The wheel does get a little better each…