Seminar: Reputational Mainstreaming of Radical Right Parties - (opens in a new window)Frederik Hjorth (University of Copenhagen) (with (opens in a new window)Theresa Gessler and (opens in a new window)Fabrizio Gilardi).

14:00-15:00 (IST) Wednesday, December 9.

Please register for this event (opens in a new window)here.

Abstract: Radical right parties have entered the mainstream of European party politics. A significant dimension of this mainstreaming process consists of a softening of radical right parties' reputations. Yet in spite of their conceptual importance, we lack valid measurements of party reputations. We address this shortcoming by developing a measure of radical right party reputations from Wikipedia data. Applying machine learning to millions of paragraphs from party descriptions, we provide novel evidence of reputational mainstreaming. In doing so, we also introduce a measurement strategy enabling researchers to measure party reputations more generally.

About the speaker: Frederik Hjorth is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen. His research focuses on political behavior with a special emphasis on anti-immigration politics. Substantively, his current research focuses especially on responses to anti-immigration politics, including how citizens and political elites react to and work to (de)legitimize anti-immigration movements.His main methodological interest is using unstructured data such as text, tweets, or online metadata to study politics.