Abstract
Since 2015, far right parties drawing heavily on radical anti-refugee rhetoric gained electoral support in Germany while the number of political hate crimes targeting refugees rose. Both phenomena – far right electoral support and prevalence of right-wing hate crimes – have theoretically and empirically been linked with socio-structural and contextual variables. However, systematic empirical research on these links is scattered and scarce at best. We combine official statistics on political hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support of the far right party “Alternative für Deutschland” (AfD) in the German national elections 2017 with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) and survey data collected in a representative survey (N = 1,506) in 2016. We aggregate and combine data for all German municipalities except Berlin which were the level of analysis for the current study. In path analyses, we find socio-structural variables to be unrelated with each other but significantly correlated with both criterion variables in a systematic fashion: proportion of foreigners was negatively while unemployment rate was positively linked with far right electoral support. Right-wing crime was linked positively with unemployment rate across Germany and positively with proportion of foreigners only in East Germany while proportion of foreigners was unrelated to right-wing crime in West Germany. When including survey measures into the model, they were linked with socio-structural variables in the predicted fashion – intergroup contact correlated positively with proportion of foreigners, collective deprivation correlated positively with unemployment rates, and both predicted extreme right-wing attitudes. However, their contribution to the explained variance in outcome variables above and beyond socio-structural variables was neglectable. We argue that both far right-wing electoral support and right-wing hate crime can be conceptualized as behavioral forms of political extremism shaped through socio-structural and contextual factors and discuss implications for preventing political extremism.
Highlights
Much has been written about the recent wave of success for far right, right-wing populist and extreme right-wing parties, figures and movements globally but especially in the Western world
We combined data from three independent and official sources: socio-structural data for the year 2016 provided by the German office for statistics, 2017 election results available through the Federal Election Commissioner, and 6,354 reports of crimes targeting refugees and their homes filed as “politically motivated crime, right-wing” by the police between 2015 and 2017 that were collected in an overview (Federal Government, 2016, 2017, 2018)
Our second dependent variable was the number of right-wing attacks and crime targeting refugees and their homes reported to police within municipalities in 2017
Summary
Much has been written about the recent wave of success for far right, right-wing populist and extreme right-wing parties, figures and movements globally but especially in the Western world. We combine official statistics on reported right-wing hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support in the German national elections 2017 and investigate links with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) on the one hand and with psychological variables measured in a representative survey (perceived threat, intergroup contact, and extreme right-wing attitudes) on the other hand.. We combine official statistics on reported right-wing hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support in the German national elections 2017 and investigate links with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) on the one hand and with psychological variables measured in a representative survey (perceived threat, intergroup contact, and extreme right-wing attitudes) on the other hand.1 We show that both phenomena co-occur geographically, and we do so in the German context where right-wing hate crime has recently peaked while the far right has seen increasing electoral support in the aftermath of the immense refugee in-migration since 2015 We combine official statistics on reported right-wing hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support in the German national elections 2017 and investigate links with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) on the one hand and with psychological variables measured in a representative survey (perceived threat, intergroup contact, and extreme right-wing attitudes) on the other hand. We show that both phenomena co-occur geographically, and we do so in the German context where right-wing hate crime has recently peaked while the far right has seen increasing electoral support in the aftermath of the immense refugee in-migration since 2015
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
