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.

I primarily work on and teach Comparative Politics, Political Behavior and Political Economy. As a scientist, I seek to address research questions which are relevant to both the academic as well as the public debate. This means that I work on some of the key challenges contemporary democracies are facing such as the rise of extremism, its societal consequences, remedies to mitigate extremism, and the erosion of social norms more generally. My studies are primarily empirically oriented using research designs which seek to rigorously test theoretical arguments mostly with (quasi-)experimental designs. If you want to learn more about my work you can find it on the papers, publications and projects pages on this website.

CV as PDF

selected papers

OSF

The Consequences of Punishing Political Ideologies in Democracies – Evidence from Employment Bans in Germany

with Vicente Valentim.

2022

Abstract URL

How can states counter growing political radicalism? We look at the effect of states persecuting “extreme” individuals by studying the case of the Anti-Radical Decree in West Germany. Implemented in 1972, this policy allowed individuals with connections to mostly communist groups to be banned from working in the public sector. Drawing upon a newly collected data set of individuals targeted by the bans, we run regression models to estimate the effect of such bans on the political behavior of German citizens measured in surveys and official election results. In particular, we look at the long-term effects of the bans by estimating their effects on establishing the Green party, formed a few years after the policy was first implemented. We find that counties that experienced bans are significantly more likely to take protest against the bans on the streets and subsequently vote for the Green party. Added to that individuals, who voice opposition to the bans in surveys are more likely to support the Greens. The effect is stronger in counties that were more leftist, politicized, and had more public sector workers. Our findings have implications for the sets of policies democracies can use to ensure their institutional survival.
OSF

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

with Roman Senninger.

2022

Abstract URL

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

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

with Sascha Riaz, Markus Wagner.

revise & resubmit: Journal of Politics 2022

Abstract URL

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

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

with Daniel Ziblatt, Hanno Hilbig.

revise & resubmit: American Political Science Review 2022

Abstract URL

Why is support for the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This paper argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center-periphery conflicts of 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.