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Reposted by Ivo Bantel

WEP Journal @wepsocial.bsky.social · Sep 8

💥Online first:

"Communicating a common front: mainstream party rhetoric and affective polarisation towards the radical right"

by @markuskollberg.bsky.social & @ivobantel.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1080/0140...

Abstract of the article "Communicating a common front: mainstream party rhetoric and affective polarisation towards the radical right" by Markus Kollberg and Ivo Bantel. Published online first in West European Politics.

Figure 1, displaying the means of elite-level negative rhetoric for target and origin parties (re-scaled to 0-10) and affective polarisation scores in the public.

Figure 4, displaying the means of skalometer outcome across treatment conditions.

Figure 5, displaying the means of feeling thermometer outcome across treatment conditions.

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Sep 3

Very happy to see our new paper out in WEP.

We document that rhetorically countering the Radical Right requires mainstream parties to form a common front to be effective.

Full paper (open access): www.tandfonline.com/doi/epdf/10....

Highlights in the thread below.

Markus Kollberg @markuskollberg.bsky.social · Sep 3

Returning from vacation and looking for a late summer read? @ivobantel.bsky.social and I got you covered!

In our new @wepsocial.bsky.social paper, we assess how mainstream parties rhetorically create an affect-based "common front" against the radical right.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Aug 29

Bargaining with authoritarians is doomed to fail. Excellent piece by @dziblatt.bsky.social and must read.

Daniel Ziblatt @dziblatt.bsky.social · Aug 28

A new piece I wrote appearing in FOREIGN AFFAIRS today

www.foreignaffairs.com/germany/warn...

Warnings From Weimar

Why bargaining with authoritarians fails.

www.foreignaffairs.com

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Aug 6

Important finding for Social Democratic parties.

Danish Social Democrats – often used as an example why Social Democratic parties should adopt anti-immigrant positions for electoral success! – could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms.

Kristina Bakkær Simonsen @kristinabsimonsen.bsky.social · Aug 6

Now in an issue @psrm.bsky.social: I show that the 🇩🇰 Social Democrats could have won policy support for a pro-immigrant platform if their messaging were framed in moral terms. Findings provide a central corrective to the popular notion that the Social Democrats were destined to go anti-immigrant 👇🏻

Political Science Research and Methods @psrm.bsky.social · Sep 24

👅Can moral language boost pro-immigrant messages and be as effective as anti-immigrant messages?

➡️ @kristinabsimonsen.bsky.social shows that pro-immigrant actors are not always bound to lose against the anti-immigrant side www.cambridge.org/core/journal... #FirstView #OpenAccess

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Apr 11

Julius Kölzer @juliusk.bsky.social · Apr 11

center-right parties accommodating the radical right

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Mar 27

New paper by Markus Kollberg in @psrm.bsky.social.

Mainstream populism doesn't work (i.e. doesn't influence voter evaluations of parties)!

Might also be relevant for some current political actors actors.

Markus Kollberg @markuskollberg.bsky.social · Mar 25

Does Mainstream Populism Work❓

I answer this question in a new paper officially out at @psrm.bsky.social❗

Check out the paper here: doi.org/10.1017/psrm...

Key take-aways in the thread below 🧵⬇️:

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Tarik Abou-Chadi @tabouchadi.bsky.social · Feb 21

Some thoughts and pointers on the upcoming German elections on Sunday. Nearly all polling institutes have released final polls in the last days that show a very similar picture. It is nearly certain that the CDU/CSU will come out on top and Friedrich Merz is going to be the next Chancellor. 1/

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Andreas Sieber @andreassieber.bsky.social · Jan 20

🧵1/X
As #Trump takes office today, @ivobantel.bsky.social and I comment for the @the-independent.com how Trump has radicalised and is a threat to #climate action and #democracy - why it's in the interest of other governments to collaborate and call his bluffs.

www.independent.co.uk/voices/trump...

Trump’s second term puts democracy and climate in peril

As Trump’s second term as US president looms, the world braces for a radical shift in democratic norms and climate action. But there is an urgent need for resistance, write climate expert Andreas Sieb...

www.independent.co.uk

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Dec 5

The reason for this effect?

RR electoral competition decreases both trust in politicians and satisfaction with democracy among non-RR supporters. For RR supporters, it has the opposite effect.

As a result, non-RR supporters are less likely to turnout to vote.

Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Dec 5

Link:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Specifically: RR parties primarily pull existing voters, not mobilize non-voters. At the same time, RR parties demobilize voters who aren't sympathetic to their programme.

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Dec 5

New study by @nickbichay.bsky.social

Radical-Right parties participating in elections disenchant and demobilize voters, endangering (not "correcting") democracy!

RR participation in elections is associated with lower(!) turnout.

But don't RR parties bring non-voters to the ballots? Not really.

A two-panel figure illustrating the conditional effect of radical-right parties on voter turnout.

The left panel, titled "Satisfaction w/ Democracy," shows two data points:
1. For non-radical-right party supporters, the effect is slightly negative (below zero) with a small error bar.
2. For radical-right party supporters, the effect is strongly positive (above zero) with a larger error bar, indicating greater variability.

The right panel, titled "Trust in Politicians," also shows two data points:

1. For non-radical-right party supporters, the effect is negative (below zero) with a small error bar.
2. For radical-right party supporters, the effect is moderately positive (above zero) with a moderate error bar.

Both panels share the y-axis labeled "Change_After_Radical-Right_Contestation," centered around zero. Error bars in both panels represent confidence intervals.

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Simone Tagliapietra @tagliapietra.bsky.social · Dec 4

Europe is at a juncture where political resistance to decarbonisation is mounting and where budgetary means to buy off consent are becoming scarce, at both EU and national levels. To get the Green Deal done, a new investment strategy is needed

www.bruegel.org/policy-brief...

An investment strategy to keep the European Green Deal on track

In this Policy Brief, we assess the investment needed to achieve the 2030 climate goal and climate neutrality by 2050

www.bruegel.org

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Nov 30

A good explainer of the surprising first round of Romanian Presidential Elections (1st round) and, importantly, the implications.

Grigore Pop-Eleches @grigopop.bsky.social · Nov 30

Writing about the elections in #Romania is like aiming at a moving target. Here's my take (as of yesterday) in @goodauth.bsky.social goodauthority.org/news/calin-g...

What just happened in Romania's election?

Călin Georgescu unexpectedly won Romania's first-round presidential election. But will the second-round vote take place on December 8?

goodauthority.org

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Drew Harwell @drewharwell.com · Nov 25

Yes, X demotes link posts; been that way for a while www.mediaite.com/news/elon-mu...

Huge pain for news orgs. Source told me NYT's X traffic plunged 50% in 1 month www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

X also delays sites Elon dislikes, as we first reported www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

Elon Musk Admits X is Throttling Links — Effectively Limiting People From Reading News

Musk confirmed that posts containing links are deprioritized, renewing criticism that the platform is restricting access to external sources of information.

www.mediaite.com

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Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · Nov 23

The victory march of democracy has ended

What can we as researchers do?

In the Scandinavian countries, a particular tool is available: Democracy & Power Studies.

The Danish government appointed me as director of such a study. We started our work this year.

A 🧵 on what we do & how we do it

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Michael Bang Petersen @m-b-petersen.bsky.social · Nov 20

A mapping of how Bluesky is becoming the new Scientific Twitter

mikeyoungacademy.dk/bluesky-is-e...

Bluesky is emerging as the new platform for science - Mike Young Academy

Scientific Twitter is about to find its true successor. And it is not X. This, our latest release, shows that the Bluesky network of scientists is growing — and growing.

mikeyoungacademy.dk

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Nov 18

Protests against the far-right reduce far-right voting through media exposure (here: study in France). A similar effect was likely the reason why AfD polled lower during/after large German anti-AfD protests.

Omar Wasow @owasow.bsky.social · Nov 16

New study looks at protests against far right in 2002 French elections. Finds “larger protests reduced number of votes for Le Pen and abstention, while increasing number of votes for the incumbent president, Chirac.” Also finds “effect worked
through media exposure.” nicolas-lagios.com/files/fn.pdf

Media, Spillovers, and Social Norms: The Electoral
Impact of Anti-Far Right Protests in the 2002
French Election*
Short title: Anti-Far Right Protests
By Nicolas Lagios†, Pierre-Guillaume Méon‡, Ilan Tojerow§
We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie
Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never host protests, we find that larger protests reduced the number of votes for Le Pen and abstention, while increasing the number of votes for the incumbent president, Jacques Chirac.
We find that the effect spread out beyond the municipalities that hosted protests and worked through media exposure. Using survey data, we show that protests reduced support for the policies advocated by Le Pen. Moreover, the positive effect on voting for Chirac resulted from right-wing voters switching from Le Pen to Chirac and left-wing voters not casting a blank ballot, implying that some voters voted expressively. Finally, we show that protests reduced the
social desirability of voting for Le Pen.

The figure reports the location and the size of the protests held on May 1, 2002, against Jean-Marie Le Pen. The figure shows a map of France with scattered dots across the country that vary in size in proportion to the size of the protest events.

Table 2 shows the Baseline Results for The Impact of Protests on Voting Outcomes. Each column is devoted to a
different electoral outcome: Specifically, the vote share of Jean-Marie Le Pen, the vote share of Jacques Chirac, and the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots. larger protests reduced the far-right candidate’s vote share. More precisely, a 0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting in a municipality decreased by 2.2 percentage points the vote share of Jean-Marie Le Pen in that municipality.

In Column (2), the dependent variable is the vote share for Jacques Chirac. Here, the
number of participants exhibits a positive coefficient that is statistically significant at the five-
percent level in all specifications. Accordingly, a larger number of participants in the May 1
protests increased the share and the number of voters who cast a ballot for the right of centre
candidate. The magnitude of the effect is again substantial without being implausibly large: A
0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting in a municipality resulted
in a 4.5 percentage points increase in Jacques Chirac’s vote share. This means that in the absence of protests, Jacques Chirac would have lost 2.3 points in the second round.
Finally, Column (3) suggests that protests also affected the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots. The number of participants exhibits a negative coefficient statistically significant at the five-percent level, implying that a 0.1 percentage point increase in the share of the population protesting reduced the share of abstentions and blank and invalid ballots by
2.3 percentage points. In the absence of protests, the share of abstentions and blank and invalid
ballots would have therefore been 0.8 point higher.

Figure 4 reports the estimated marginal effect of the number of participants on the agreement of respondents with the policies sponsored by Jean-Marie Le Pen: immigration, security,
traditional values, criticism of the political class, the abolition of the income tax, and an exit of France from the EU. The marginal effect is always negative and statistically significant at standard levels.
We also looked at two more specific measures of the position of respondents on immigration, which was the theme on which Jean-Marie Le Pen was the most salient. Specifically, respondents were asked their level of agreement with the following two statements: “there are too many immigrants” and “immigrants enrich a culture”. Here, Jean-Marie Le Pen was not explicitly mentioned. We observe that respondents in municipalities that experienced larger protests were less likely to agree with the statement that there are too many immigrants and more likely to agree with the statement that immigrants enrich a culture.

This series of findings is consistent with the models of Lohmann (1994) and Battaglini (2017) that argue that protests can raise public awareness around the issues at stake. Larger protests against Jean-Marie Le Pen might have reduced voters’ support for his policies by signalling the negative issues associated with those policies, thereby decreasing the incentive to vote for the far-right candidate.
Again, we cannot rule out that protests triggered a social desirability bias on specific policies even if an exit from the EU or a critique of the political class were sponsored by other candidates unrelated to and less stigmatized than Jean-Marie Le Pen. In any case, we return to social desirability in Section 7.3.

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Ivo Bantel @ivobantel.bsky.social · Nov 16

FDP plante Bruch der Ampel unter der Bezeichnung der Operation für die Befreiung der Normandie von Nazi-Deutschland! Verantwortungsloses Verhalten kann zusätzlich auch noch geschichtsvergessen und geschmacklos par excellence sein. #DDayGate

Christian Endt @cendt.de · Nov 15

Die FDP-Spitze hat den Bruch der Ampel über Wochen geplant. Krasse Recherche von @bertpsch.bsky.social
www.zeit.de/politik/deut...

Christian Lindner: Das liberale Drehbuch für den Regierungssturz

Geheime Sitzungen, Präsentationen, Strategiepapiere: Recherchen der ZEIT zeigen, wie die FDP den Bruch der Ampel wochenlang vorbereitete. Der Name der Operation: "D-Day"

www.zeit.de

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Bettina Kohlrausch @bettikohlrausch.bsky.social · Mar 5

Das Gender Pay Gap beträgt in diesem Jahr unverändert 18%. Der Gender Pay-Gap ist auch im europäischen Vergleich sehr hoch und reflektiert Arbeitsmarktstrukturen, die Frauen systematisch benachteiligt. www.destatis.de/DE/Presse/Pr...

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