What a week: we congratulate Dr. Jasmin Fitzpatrick on her habilitation and Paula Windecker on her doctorate!

Kai Arzheimer's bibliography on far right parties, voters, and activists is a public resource that has been online since 2010. The most recent edition adds 222 new titles, bringing the total number of articles, chapters and books listed in the bibliography to 1436. To see what is new, click here or watch the video.

 

How important is political geography for far-right attitudes (nativism, populism, authoritarianism)? What do different authors even mean when they write about the role of 'place' in this context? Can 'place' (or rather its different aspects) explain the distribution of far-right attitudes in Germany and elsewhere? In a recent contribution in European Political Science Review, Kai Arzheimer and Theresa Bernemann answer these (and some other) questions. Just click the link (it's open access). Or if all that is a bit too much, just watch the video.

In 2013, the "Alternative for Germany" started out as a soft-eurosceptic vehicle for disappointed centre-right voters and politicians. Since then, it has changed beyond all recognition. In a recent contribution for Electoral Studies, Carl Berning and I trace the changing motives and composition of the AfD's electorate using data that span the whole of the 2013-2017 electoral cycle. Our main finding is that anti-immigration sentiment, which had no effect on the AfD vote during the first two years, is now by far the most important predictor.

The full article is ungated until July 5, 2019. After that date, the pre-print (authors' version) is still freely available from my personal website.

Arzheimer, Kai and Carl Berning. “How the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and their voters veered to the radical right, 2013-2017.” Electoral Studies (2019): forthcoming. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2019.04.004

Staff and students are cordially invited to attend the next event in our staff seminar series. Richard Johnston (UBC, Vancouver) will give a talk on campaign effects in the US, Canada, and Germany on Wednesday May 20, 6pm in room 01-611 (Georg-Forster-Gebäude).

Our Guest

Richard Johnston is one of the world's leading experts on electoral behaviour and electoral campaigns. He holds the Canada Research Chair in Public Opinion, Elections, and Representation at UBC and is also a Marie Curie Research Fellow at the EUI (Florence)

Campaign Effects

Elections are a defining feature of representative democracy, and electoral campaigns are critical for accountability and for signals about policy. But so far the research record yields very partial views of whether - or how - campaigns work. Broadly, two schools can be identified. On one side, elections are driven by predictable "fundamental" forces that campaigns merely activate. On the other, campaigns do more: they are critical to the result and produce history in their own right. The fundamentalist perspective is essentially benign. More intense campaigns bring out more voters. Negative claims are more truthful than positive ones; indeed the increased volume and negativity of campaigns has compensated for the decline in substantive news coverage. Elections without campaigns would be far more random events than are elections with them. On the rival view, campaigns are sites for character assassination if not outright manipulation. These fears are amplified by technological developments, including the rise of social media and "big data," and extend even to the most traditional form of campaign effort, doorstep mobilization. Can these competing claims both be true? If so what is their relative weight, and how are those weights contingent on institutional and party-system context?

 

 

Within less than two years of being founded by disgruntled members of the governing CDU, the newly-formed Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has already performed extraordinary well in the 2013 General election, the 2014 EP election, and a string of state elections. Highly unusually by German standards, it campaigned for an end to all efforts to save the Euro and argued for a re-configuration of Germany's foreign policy. This seems to chime with the recent surge in far right voting in Western Europe, and the AfD was subsequently described as right-wing populist and europhobe.

On the basis of the party's manifesto and of hundreds of statements the party has posted on the internet, this article demonstrates that the AfD does indeed occupy a position at the far-right of the German party system, but it is currently neither populist nor does it belong to the family of Radical Right parties. Moreover, its stance on European Integration is more nuanced than expected and should best be classified as soft eurosceptic.

The full article will appear in the 2015 volume of West European Politics. The author's version is available here.

Localism has become an important issue in British Politics. Previous research has shown that the objective geographical distance between voters and candidates played an important role in the 2010 General Election and the 2013 English local elections even when party attachment and incumbency were controlled for.

Thanks to the generosity of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, we are now able to re-interview 11,000 voters that have previously been surveyed by Rosie Campbell and Phil Cowley to see if localism still matters in the thoroughly changed context of the 2015 General Election.

How important is 'localness' for candidates? Using an unique data set on the English Country Council elections, we estimate the effect of physical distance between voters and candidates on voting behaviour. The full results have just been published in Research & Politics (ungated).