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Extremism Ongoing

When social norms shift, extreme values surface — from hate crimes to radical-right voting and voter polarization

A central insight from my work on radical-right party entry — published in the American Journal of Political Science — is that when extreme actors gain political legitimacy, the social norms governing the expression of extreme views shift. Values that were previously held in check can suddenly be revealed and acted upon: voters polarize, bystanders radicalize, and latent resentments find political expression. This project takes that mechanism as its intellectual starting point.

The cases studied here each test the same underlying logic from different angles: a local crime event shifts perceptions of out-group threat; a radical party's entry into parliament normalizes previously stigmatized views; spatial concentrations of cultural resentment find political voice when an electoral vehicle appears. Across these settings, the common thread is norm change unlocking extreme behavior — and the downstream consequences for democratic societies.

Approach

Key Findings

  1. Vicarious retribution: Local crime events attributed to immigrants trigger a 65% increase in xenophobic hate crimes against refugees in the immediate aftermath.
  2. Peripheral voting: Regions with greater historical dialectal distance to standard German see significantly higher radical-right support, especially during periods of large refugee inflows.
  3. Place-based impact: Decentralized, grassroots mobilization by M5S produced substantial, hyperlocal boosts in referendum opposition.
  4. Polarization cascade: First-time entrance of radical parties into parliament leads to immediate legitimization-and-backlash effects and enduring ideological polarization among voters.
  5. SD voter de-mobilization: Large shares of former Social Democratic voters have been de-mobilized or shifted to more progressive parties (Greens, Liberal Democrats). Generational cohort — not income or occupation — is the strongest predictor of departure, suggesting social democratic electorates are aging out rather than actively defecting to the radical right.

Publications

Working Papers

Funding