Do Voters Polarize when Radical Parties Enter Parliament?

(with Markus Wagner), American Journal of Political Science: forthcoming.

We argue that the elite polarization as signalled by radical parties’ first entrance into parliament leads to public polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimation can have a far-reaching impact on society.

How Parties Organize from the Grounds: The Genesis of the Movimento 5 Stelle

(with Thomas Kurer)

Whether voters’ online activities translate into the offline sphere of politics and elections is an ongoing debate. We suggest that online communication is an important tool to connect and voice local interests, which are then mobilized by traditional on-the-ground party activity. To test this argument, we study the impact of the populist Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) on the rejection of the 2016 constitutional referendum in Italy. The movement’s unusual practice to coordinate activities on a public event platform provides a unique opportunity to collect the complete event history of a modern political party. We merge this data consisting of over 200,000 geo-coded meetings by 1,000 local chapters with referendum results and individual panel data. Relying on regression, matching, and instrumental variable models, we find a small but consistent effect of M5S activity on the referendum outcome. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of the internet’s impact on elections and politics more generally.

Left Behind Communities and the Radical-Right: Do Peripheral Cultures Vote for the Radical Right in Germany?

(with Hanno Hilbig & Daniel Ziblatt)

What explains the radical right's electoral success? We propose that voters in "parochial" regions are more predisposed to voting for radical-right parties. We define "parochialism" as a geographic community where voters possess strong place-based social identities characterized by four attributes: low contact with outsiders; strong in-group ties; hostility towards outsiders; and, above all, high dialectal distance from the national standard language. We measure place-based social identity with 725,000 responses to a unique survey of regional German dialects. Using aggregate and individual-level data, we demonstrate that dialectal distance from the national standard language strongly predicts voting for the radical-right AfD party. Our contribution is two-fold. First, we clarify the concept of place-based social identity and its connection to parochialism as a source of radical-right voting. Second, drawing on recent research in socio-linguistics, we demonstrate that dialects are a useful measure of social identity not previously used to explain political behavior.

When Democracies Economically Punish Voters — Evidence from Employment Bans in Germany

(with Vicente Valentim)

How can states counter growing political extremism? We look at the effect of states persecuting radical individuals by studying the case of the radical decree in Germany. Implemented in 1972, this policy allowed individuals with connections to extremist groups to be banned from working in the public sector. We argue that this policy might have backfired, increasing extremist behavior and reducing voting for the incumbent. Drawing upon a newly collected dataset of individuals targeted by the bans, we run difference-in-differences models to estimate the effect of such bans on the political behavior of German citizens. We also look at the long term effects of the bans by looking at its effects on reducing the vote for the far-right party AfD, formed four decades after the policy was first implemented. In future iterations of the paper, we intend to enrich our findings by contacting and interviewing individuals targeted by the bans. Our findings have implications for the repertoire of policies that states can implement to deter extremist behavior and safeguard democracy.

Does exposure to radical right marches affect voting and political preferences?

Politicians and journalists frequently emphasize that radical right grassroots mobilization matters for elections and preferences in exposed communities. The organizers of these marches explicitly seek to provide ``safe spaces'' for divergent, radical positions and, thereby, attempt to change the local perception of support for these radical views. Focusing on the German case and combining geo-coded protest data derived from the German security services with election results and public opinion data, I test these arguments employing difference-in-differences, matching and instrumental variable models. I find robust evidence that radical right marches affect elections and support for nationalism in exposed communities.

Against the globalist class: Does the Alternative for Germany borrow from Hitler?

(with Judith Spirig)

Pundits and journalists suggest that some of the language and images used by radical right parties are reminiscent of speeches of fascist politicians in pre-WWII times. Most prominently Alexander Gauland, leader of the German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), has been accused of having borrowed from Hitler. We test these allegations using the full set of Hitler’s speeches between 1925 and 1933 and the speeches of several AfD proponents -- including Gauland.

The Political Legacies of Military Service: Evidence From a Natural Experiment

Does military service affect soldiers' civilian life and political attitudes after service? While a rich body of research investigates the effects of combat participation on draftees' attitudes, we know little about the effects of military service in the absence of combat. However, a widely shared concern is that the military socializes its draftees into authoritarian values running orthogonal to the values of civilians' lives in democracies. I identify the causal effect of compulsory military service on recruits' political attitudes by leveraging the quasi-random assignment of the re-introduced draft in Germany in 1956. Using several data sources I do not find any effects of past military service on current political attitudes. On the contrary, my findings suggest that the introduction of civilian service and suspension of compulsory service make a selection of more conservatively-minded into the army ever more likely. These findings imply that processes of examination and all-encompassing service might forestall such unwanted selection processes based on political ideology.