Right-Wing Protest and Hate Crimes

Sulin Sardoschau and Annalí Casanueva-Artís

No 26073, RFBerlin Discussion Paper Series from ROCKWOOL Foundation Berlin (RFBerlin)

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of right-wing populist mobilization on anti-minority violence across 10,000 German municipalities between 2015 and 2019. Exploiting variation in weather conditions on scheduled protest days, we show that right-wing protests held on pleasant days increase their salience and visibility by attracting larger crowds, generating more attention in traditional and social media and subsequently raising the probability of hate crimes by 8.6 percentage points. These offenses are carried out predominantly by known, recidivist, lone-actor extremists in the aftermath of the protest. Spillovers are substantial: downstream newspaper coverage of protests and social media networks transmit violence to municipalities that did not host any protest. Our findings highlight a critical externality of grass-roots populist movements: they not only drive immediate local violence but also propagate it across wider networks.

Keywords: Populism; hate crimes; protest; media (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 D74 J15 K42 L82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-03
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:crm:wpaper:26073

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