Understanding the Rise of the Radical Right
Syllabus
General
Course
- Thu 10:00 – 14:00
- Universitätsstr. 3b, Room 205
- Moodle: moodle.hu-berlin.de
- Course Number: 53046
- Password:
covfefe_2024
Instructor
- Tim Wappenhans
tim.wappenhans@hu-berlin.de - Office: ISW, room 404
Goals
This is an advanced class on political behavior and party competition. We will examine contemporary, empirical literature that tries to understand different causes for radical right voting, the effects of radical right actors on society. The focus of the literature rests on the US and Europe. The rise of the radical right is a topic with far reaching ramifications for society and we will discuss those. However, as a quantitative researcher I strongly believe that this discussion must be informed by evidence. I assume that you are comfortable engaging with quantitative research that is increasingly focused on causally identifying effects. That is, you should have completed the methods section of our BA program or any other course that gives you basic understanding of statistical models and design based thinking. If you haven’t, you are still very welcome but I expect that you are willing to learn about those concepts as we go. After completing the course, you will be equipped with the knowledge to criticize existing research, find gaps in the literature, and follow your own research agenda.
Requirements
Again, I want to stress that we will engage with quantitative research in every session. Your final paper will also be based on data analysis so please keep this in mind. You will earn a total of 10 Credit Points (CP) in this course. That is the result of 250 hours of work which is distributed across these requirements:
- Active Participation 💬
(2 CP) - Reading 📚
(2 CP) - Reading Diary 📔
(1 CP) - Non-academic input 🎨
(1 CP) - Research Proposal 💭
(1 CP) - Final Paper ✏️
(3 CP)
1. Active Participation 💬
This is the backbone of our course. Without your engagement the whole thing will be dreadfully boring and uninspiring. This puts the spotlight on you. I expect you to come prepared to class. That means you should read the literature and get an idea about what you understand and what you don’t. The next two points should help you in this regard. (2 CP)
2. Reading 📚
Each week, we have three contemporaneous articles from high quality from political science or general interest journals. Engage with the literature before our sessions. Be critical and question the logic of the argument brought forward as well as the data and analysis provided. I can’t recommend Macartan Humphreys’ advice on how to read scientific papers enough (macartan.github.io). (2 CP)
3. Reading Diary 📔
On moodle, you will find an excel file reading_diary.xlsx. For Sessions 03-13, take one text that you really want to understand deeper and fill out the following columns
- Research question
- Main argument
- Theoretical mechanism
- Evidence
- Critique
- Open questions
Upload your reading diary before the respective session, named lastname_session.xlsx. So for example wappenhans_03.xlsx for Session 03, wappenhans_04.xlsx for Session 04 etc, so that the excel file grows every week. You can skip one week without excuse. (1 CP)
4. Non-academic input 🎨
For one session, you will have to prepare a non-academic input. That is, show us something that connects your real-life experience and the scientific texts we have read for the session. This can be a newspaper article, a podcast, a YouTube video, a story. Anything that strikes a chord with you when you have read the papers for the week.
No matter the form of your input, please put a picture of it on a PDF and explain why you chose it. Upload this PDF before your session on moodle.
Also, please fill in your name on google drive to coordinate the sessions. (1 CP)
5. Research Proposal 💭
For our last session (July 18 2024), we will have a little conference where you will present a research proposal for your final paper and give feedback to your colleagues. Giving and getting feedback is an elementary part of academia. It’s also a pretty fun part…usually. Either way, it will help your process tremendously. We will start early thinking about your final paper and workshop your ideas together. In this proposal
- state your research question
- briefly describe your argument and theoretical mechanism
- as well as some falsifiable expectations
- what data you could use
- and what empirical strategy you could apply to test your expectations
The proposal should be around a page long. Please upload your research proposal as a PDF on moodle.
In this conference, you will not only be presenting but also give feedback on a proposal from your peers. More on this later in the course. (1 CP)
6. Final Paper ✏️
The final part of this course is a paper of 40,000 characters, not counting spaces. This paper is what your final grade will be based on. After completing the course, we will have seen where the political behavior literature on the radical right stands. At the same time, you will hopefully have found some questions to remain unanswered. Your final term paper will engage with one of those unanswered questions empirically. This is an undergrad course and there will be limitations to what you can do. Don’t worry about that. Rather, be transparent about potential pitfalls and shortcomings. Macartan Humphreys has great advice on how to write a paper (macartan.github.io).
We will learn more about what makes a great paper during the course but in short, I expect you to
- find a concise research question
- motivated by discussing the current state of the political science literature (that is, peer reviewed journal articles and scientific books)
- that’s substantively relevant
- develop an argument that comes from the theory
- and articulate precise, falsifiable expectations
- find data to test these expectations
Please also send your R script or Stata Do-File for replication. Whatever typesetting software you use, convert your file to PDF before uploading it to moodle. (3 CP)
Course Structure
I image our sessions to look like this: we will have in-depth discussions about the literature in the first half of our day. After a coffee or quick lunch break, we’ll come back and see how your non-academic input speaks to what we’ve learned from the literature. After that we will have some time for you to workshop your ideas and for me to show you tools that can help you in your academic process.
| Time | What’s happening |
|---|---|
| 10.15 - 11.45 | Discussing texts |
| 11.45 - 12.15 | 🥡 |
| 12.15 - 13.00 | Discussing non-academic inputs |
| 13.00 - 13.45 | Tools for academic process |
Course Plan
| Session | Date | Literature | Tools |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 Intro | 18.04 | ||
| 02 Overview | 25.04. | Bonikowski (2017); Golder (2016) | How to read |
| 03 Economic Hardship | 02.05. | Funke, Schularick, and Trebesch (2016); Kates and Tucker (2019) | Literature Review |
04 No class |
09.05. |
National Holiday |
|
| 05 Cultural Anxiety | 16.05. | Ivarsflaten (2008); Mutz (2018) | Finding RQ I |
| 06 Gender Attitudes | 23.05. | Green and Shorrocks (2023); Anduiza and Rico (2024) | occupation |
| 07 Political Geography | 30.05. | Ziblatt, Hilbig, and Bischof (2023); Cremaschi, Bariletto, and Vries (2023) | occupation |
| 08 Deep Dive | 06.06. | Hochschild (2018), Part I and Part II, plus Chapters 9, 15 and 16 | Tools for Writing |
| 09 Supply Side | 13.06. | Arzheimer and Carter (2006); Abou-Chadi and Krause (2020) | Finding RQ II |
| 10 Legitimization | 20.06. | Valentim (2021); Riaz, Bischof, and Wagner (2023) | Data Sources |
| 11 Ramifications | 28.06. (Fri) | Bellodi, Morelli, and Vannoni (2024); Bischof and Wagner (2019) | Workshop RQ I |
12 No class |
04.07. |
EPSA |
|
| 13 What to do | 11.07. | Fishkin et al. (2024); tba Kollberg | Workshop RQ II |
| 14 Conference | 19.07. (Fri) |