 Populism and propagation of far-right extremismFelix Hagemeister European Journal of Political Economy, 2022, vol. 72, issue C Abstract: Under which conditions does populist success propagate far-right extremism? This paper examines how an information shock about the acceptance of xenophobic positions spurs an increase in far-right protests in more liberal areas in Germany. Using staggered state elections between 2014 and 2017 as a quasi-natural experiment and leveraging novel data, I show that far-right protests are unleashed in more liberal areas which were “shocked” by the surprising state-level results of the newly emerging right-wing populist AfD party (“Alternative für Deutschland”). The effect is sizeable, but depends on surprise. When success of the populist party is severely underestimated, a municipality with a populist vote share 10 percentage points below state average faces a roughly 30 percent increase of the mean likelihood of an additional far-right protest. The effect materializes only after the rightward shift of the AfD and vanishes when polling institutions correctly estimate the populist party’s success. Keywords: Populism; Far-right; Extremism; Protests; Germany (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:poleco:v:72:y:2022:i:c:s0176268021000999 DOI: 10.1016/j.ejpoleco.2021.102116 Access Statistics for this article European Journal of Political Economy is currently edited by J. De Haan, A. L. Hillman and H. W. Ursprung More articles in European Journal of Political Economy from Elsevier |
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