Putsch in the AfD! This morning, I woke up to the news that Andre Poggenburg, former leader of the AfD in Saxony-Anhalt and former chair of the AfD’s delegation in the state parliament is now also a former member of the AfD. And thanks to @TheDanHough, I quickly learned that he has already set up…
Topic modelling does not work well for (my) research paper abstracts The Radical Right Research Robot is a fun side project whose life began exactly one year ago. The Robot exists to promote the very large body of knowledge on Radical Right parties and their voters that social scientists have accumulated over decades. At its…
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…
The other day, I had a chat about the extent of the Far Right’s rise in Europe and the structural factors behind that with Courthouse News. Here’s the article, with some choice quotes by me. [contentcards url="https://www.courthousenews.com/far-right-parties-building-strength-across-europe/" target="_blank"]
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…
Back in August, Franziska Schreiber made quite a splash with her memoir of the four years she spent inside Germany’s not-so-new-anymore Radical Right party. Schreiber was in her mid-twenties when she joined only weeks after the party was founded. She helped building up the AfD’s youth organisation – controversial even within the party – in…