The Laboratory for Comparative Social Research announces the next  regular seminar, which will be held in Saint Petersburg (room 204, 16, Soyuza Pechatnikov) on November 22 at 5 p.m. Boris Sokolov, a LCSR junior research fellow, will deliver a report on "Value change and voting for radical right parties in Europe: 1990-2010" .

This project aims to explore the main determinants of the recent electoral successes of extreme right parties in Europe. I also try to investigate this phenomenon in a broader context of value change in Europe. Most scholars who studied extreme right voting focused on the socio-economics determinants of it such as unemployment rate, level of immigration, or GDP per capita on the country level, and employment status and class position on the individual level. The main object of interest in my research is a value component of extreme right voting. I present two distinct analyses. First, using data on 27 EU countries and also Norway and Switzerland collected during waves 1 to 6 of the World Value Survey I construct two indices: index of postmaterialism which reflects the general strand of value change in Europe and index of xenophobia which reflects individual attitudes toward out-groups including migrants and foreigners in general. Then I explore how these value indicators affect individual ideological position on the left-right scale. I found that both postmaterialism index and xenophobia/tolerance index are significant predictors of ideological position on the individual level; however, predictive power of these models is not high (R-square is less than 4%). The second step of my analysis is the exploration of European electoral statistics for 1990-2010 using aggregated WVS indices of trust, postmaterialism, and xenophobia/tolerance as proxies for value change trends. The main result of the analysis is that value polarization (measured as dispersion of individual scores for various value dimensions in a given country in a given period of time) is a much stronger predictor of the far right voting than the aggregated value indices. It is also shown that interaction between migration stock and general level of trust increases share of votes for right-wing parties while GDP per capita (PPP) and majoritarian electoral system lead to less successful electoral outcomes for ERPs.

Everyone interested is invited!

Working language is English

Videoconference with Moscow office of the LCSR (Kochnovskiy Pr. 3, room 306) will be provided. Also after the seminar a videotape will be put up after the summary of the presentation.

Students, professors and employees of HSE have to take their passes with them. All the guests are asked to send e-mail to m.marinanikitina@gmail.com (in Moscow) or o.o.basmanova@gmail.com (in Saint Petersburg) before noon in the day of the event.