People Politics. Exploring the link between populist rhetoric, institutional representation and far right mobilisation

This study will focus on reconceptualising the role of political opportunities in understanding mobilisation patterns. Political engagement is generally thought to decrease levels of extra-institutional violence (Kriesi et al, 1995). As violent behaviour is associated with high risks for the aggressor, its occurrence hinges on the existence of legitimate channels to pressure political elites. This theory is in line with research on ethnic violence in Germany (Braun and Koopmans; 2014; Grund, 2011; Koopmans and Olzak, 2004), which find that violence is less likely in communities with strong right-extremist party support.
I aim to specifically analyse the relationship between political representation and extra-institutional mobilisation. By defining populism as a discursive strategy instead of as a stable ideological attribute, it may be possible to analyse how changes in political rhetoric influence far right mobilisation patterns (see Bonikowski and Gidron 2016). I will additionally aim to quantify parties' willingness to excuse or encourage right-extremist violent acts by applying cutting-edge computational text analysis to political corpora. In doing so, I hope to get a more realistic grasp on how politicians and their reactions to violent events influence diffusion patterns of ethnic conflict, and, more generally, explore the intricate relationship between institutional representation and extra-institutional mobilisation.
My proposed research topic consists of three main components. The first part will focus on continuing my MSc Dissertation project, expanding the dataset and looking at a wider set of questions. By including other forms of politically motivated crimes, it will be possible to widen the scope of the paper to explore whether motivations for criminal behaviour differ according to the severity of the offense. As violent events are temporally clustered and non-randomly distributed across Germany, the study seeks to map the diffusion processes of ethnic conflict across the country, using event history analyses and panel regression models. Increasing the number of cases will also allow a more rigorous analysis of the difference between official and independent statistics, in order to reveal which factors make the registration of a right extremist crime as "politically-motivated" more likely.
The second part of my research project will explore the dynamics of populist claim-making in German politics. By operationalizing populism as a discursive strategy, where the interests of a virtuous populace are juxtaposed with those of corrupt elites, it is possible to analyse variations in the occurrence of populism within parties and politicians, focusing specifically on populist rhetoric centred around migration debates. Following Bonikowski and Gidron (2016), I plan on applying dictionary-based automated text analysis to the study of political corpora. Sociologists have counted statements as reported in newspapers, but digital text analysis enables us to capitalise on the rise of the Internet and the flood of textual data, and quantify dynamics that were previously thought to be impossible to analyse. A computational data approach would shed light on the content of far-right populist discourse, and may show whether the usage of populist claims corresponds to current socio-economic and demographic contexts.
In the final part of the D.Phil. research project, I aim to combine the approaches in the first two chapters to explore how variations in right populist rhetoric influence mobilisation processes. Combining computational text analysis with event history models of right-extremist crimes, I also aim to identify politicians' roles in mediating the diffusion of violent events to their constituency. Does the way far right politicians' react to violent events have an influence on their subsequent diffusion?