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. Prior to Aarhus, I have been an SNF Ambizione (2019-2023) and postdoctoral fellow (2015-2019) 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

APSR

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

with Daniel Ziblatt, Hanno Hilbig.

American Political Science Review 2023

Abstract URL PDF

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.
JoP

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

with Thomas Kurer.

Journal of Politics 2023

Abstract URL PDF

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.
APSR

Tabloid media campaigns and public opinion: Quasi-experimental evidence on Euroscepticism in England

with Florian Foos.

American Political Science Review 2022

Abstract URL PDF

Whether powerful media outlets have effects on public opinion has been at the heart of theoretical and empirical discussions about the media’s role in political life. Yet, the effects of media campaigns are difficult to study because citizens self-select into media consumption. Using a quasi-experiment—the 30-year boycott of the most important Eurosceptic tabloid newspaper, The Sun, in Merseyside caused by the Hillsborough soccer disaster—we identify the effects of The Sun boycott on attitudes toward leaving the EU. Difference-in-differences designs using public opinion data spanning three decades, supplemented by referendum results, show that the boycott caused EU attitudes to become more positive in treated areas. This effect is driven by cohorts socialized under the boycott and by working-class voters who stopped reading The Sun. Our findings have implications for our understanding of public opinion, media influence, and ways to counter such influence in contemporary democracies.
AJPS

Do Voters Polarize When Radical Parties Enter Parliament?

with Markus Wagner.

American Journal of Political Science 2019

Abstract URL PDF

Do voters polarize ideologically when radical views gain political legitimacy, or does the rise of radical voices merely reflect societal conflict? We argue that elite polarization as signaled by radical parties’ first entrance into parliament leads to voter divergence. Immediately after the election, legitimization and backlash effects mean that voters on both ideological sides move toward the extremes. In the longer term, this polarization is solidified because of radical parties’ parliamentary presence. A panel study of Dutch voters shows that the 2002 parliamentary entrance of a radical-right party indeed led to immediate ideological polarization across the political spectrum. Estimating time-series cross-sectional models on Eurobarometer data from 17 countries (1973–2016) shows an additional long-term impact of radical-right party entry on polarization. The presence of radical voices on the right has polarizing effects, illustrating how such institutional recognition and legitimization can have a far-reaching impact on society.