Daniel Bischof

Building: 1340, Room: 234

Bartholins Allé 7, DK

8000 Aarhus C, DK

I am an Associate Professor (tenured) of Political Science at the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University and a SNSF Ambizione Grant Holder at the University of Zurich.

My major research interest focuses on trying to understand how norms shift in our societies. For instance, in my SNSF Ambizione Project I study how the emergence of radical parties changes people’s perception of norms in politics, discourses and behavior. In my research, I seek to address research questions which are relevant to both the academic as well as the public debate. My studies are primarily empirically oriented using research designs which seek to rigorously test theoretical arguments mostly with (quasi-)experimental designs.

CV as PDF

selected papers

OSF

Wealth of Tongues: Why Peripheral Regions Vote for the Radical Right in Germany

with Daniel Ziblatt and Hanno Hilbig,

revise & resubmit: American Political Science Review 2021

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Why do voters for the radical right tend to cluster in specific geographic locations? Many scholars have emphasized the economic roots of radical right support. Other scholarship highlights the role of the urban-rural divide, contending that the radical right finds support in low population density locations due to distinctive social values and strong place-based social identities found in rural areas. To date, however, we do not have a full grasp of the sources of these latter factors nor an understanding of the historical roots that explain their emergence. We argue that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical right support in previous research is in part a proxy for something entirely different: communities that were in the historical "periphery" in the center-periphery conflicts that shaped modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues” (Weber 1976)—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.
OSF

Out-group Threat and Xenophobic Hate Crimes: Evidence of Local Intergroup Conflict Dynamics between Immigrants and Natives

with Sascha Riaz and Markus Wagner,

revise & resubmit: American Journal of Political Science 2021

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This study examines the relationship between crimes attributed to immigrants and hate crimes against refugees at the local level. We argue that localized crime events attributed to immigrants can lead natives to exact retribution against uninvolved out-group members. We investigate such intergroup conflict dynamics between immigrants and natives in Germany, a country that has in recent years experienced a sharp increase in both the foreign-born population and hate crimes. Our empirical analysis leverages fine-grained geo-coded data on more than 9,400 hate crimes and 60,000 immigrant-attributed crime events between 2015 and 2019. Using a regression discontinuity in time design (RDiT), we show that the daily probability of hate crimes doubles in the immediate aftermath of an immigrant crime event in a local community. Additional evidence points to mobilization rather than legitimization as a likely mechanism. Our results speak to growing concerns about xenophobic violence in Western democracies.
OSF

Place-Based Campaigning: The Political Impact of Real Grassroots Mobilization

with Thomas Kurer,

revise & resubmit: Journal of Politics 2021

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Generations of research have incrementally identified the circumstances under which electoral campaigns matter. Direct, interpersonal contact within local networks is commonly seen as conducive to campaign impact but empirical evidence is scarce due to demanding data requirements. We advance the literature by studying the Movimento Cinque Stelle, an important challenger party in Italy, which followed the unusual practice of coordinating all political activities on a public online platform. We webscraped the entire event history of the Movement’s more than 1,000 local branches with over 200,000 geocoded political activities to study the effect and mechanisms of their campaign against the 2016 constitutional referendum – a watershed moment in Italian politics. Relying on regression, matching, and instrumental variable models, we demonstrate substantial campaign effects. Our results indicate that social networks amplify the effectiveness of a campaign while highlighting both the continued relevance and the particular potency of place-based political mobilization.
OSF

How Simple Messages Affect Voters’ Knowledge and Their Perceptions of Politicians

with Roman Senninger,

2021

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Public discourse is increasingly concerned with the way how politicians communicate. This is fuelled by a new generation of politicians like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, and representatives of populist parties who evidently communicate less sophisticated than mainstream politicians. However, the question whether and how linguistic styles affect citizens is largely unexplored. We argue that both citizens and politicians might benefit from simple political communication. First, mechanically citizens should have a better chance to understand political positions if political discourse is less sophisticated. Second, linguistic simplicity can function as a heuristic for citizens by signaling that politicians are amongst ‘the people’ instead of being part of the ‘elites’. We test our arguments using a pre-registered three-wave vignette survey experiment in Germany (N = 5,700). Our findings show that simple messages (as compared to sophisticated messages) indeed increase citizens’ comprehension of political positions. Moreover, we find that citizens use language sophistication as a heuristic to fill informational gaps about politicians. Politicians who communicate less sophisticated are perceived to have rather modest socioeconomic backgrounds. As a result, the use of simple language can benefit politicians’ claims to belong to the people instead of the elite. Our findings add important new insights to our understanding of the effects of political communication in contemporary democracies.
OSF

Lost in Transition – Where Are All the Social Democrats Today?

with Thomas Kurer,

prepared for an edited book by Silja Häusermann and Herbert Kitschelt 2021

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This chapter follows individual voter flows using panel data for Social Democrats in Germany (1984-2018), the United Kingdom (1991-2018) and Switzerland (1999-2018). To our knowledge this chapter, thus, provides the first long running study of individual voting transitions amongst Social Democratic voters, following their transitions for almost 40 years. The key goal of this chapter is to understand where initial voters of the Social Democrats are today and which individual level characteristics correlate with leaving SDs. We find: 1) Social Democrats manage to keep some of their core 2) but a lot of their core gets de-mobilized or moves on to more progressive options (Greens, LibDem, Green Liberal Party). 3) SDs struggle in all countries to attract new voters, less so in Switzerland which we think is at least partly due to the progressive offer provided by the SP. In contrast, the German SPD loses to everyone and gains almost nothing. We also find evidence that SDs die out: the key factor correlated with ‘leaving’ is the generational cohort Social Democrats belong to. In contrast, often theorized and emphasized factors such as occupation, income or unemployment show much smaller correlations with former Social Democrats’ decision to leave the party behind.