Is anti-immigration sentiment behind the radical right vote in all of Europe? It’s been a mere three decades since 1990, or as we old-timers are prone to say, a generation. But for some (cough) Europeanists, the CEE countries are still either terra incognita or just an extension of their western counterparts. While much of the…
Neat summary of where we stand by Isabelle Hertner
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…
Wakelet – what is it, and why should academics care to “curate” tweets about events? Bear with me for a second. The sad state of curating and social story telling Until about about a year ago, there was a storify.com. Their business idea was that people would “curate” tweets, facebook posts and other stuff found…
So far, Germany’s mainstream parties have resisted the temptation to construct a link between the current mass migration of refugees from the middle east and the growing (?) risk of islamist terror attacks in Europe. In a piece I wrote for Policy Network, I take a long(ish) hard look at the respective positions of Merkel’s…
One feels almost sorry for the Social Democratic left: They are squeezed between the more modern Greens/Libertarians on the one hand, and the Extreme Right on the other. Here’s the preprint of a chapter I’m preparing on that topic.
Does Christian religiosity reduce or increase the likelihood of a radical/extreme right vote in a West European context?This is the question Liz and I are trying to address in our latest paper
In a recent article in the European Journal of Political Research, Kestilä and Söderlund claim (amongst other things) that in the French regional elections of 2004, turnout and district magnitude have significant negative effects on the extreme right vote whereas the effects of the number of party lists and unemployment are positive and significant. Most…
Everyone just seems to know that the voters of the Extreme Right hate foreigners in general and immigrants in particular, but robust comparative evidence for the alleged xenophobia – Radical Right vote link is scarce. Moreover, many of the published analyses are based on somewhat outdated (i.e. 1990s) data, and alternative accounts of the extreme…
In a recent post, I have commented on a (now scrapped) law from the 1930s that made it technically illegal for “foreign” PhDs to use their titles in Germany. A superficially similar case concerns the German citizenship law that was first enacted in 1913 (the Empire happily existed without a concept of federal citizenship for…