Political extremism and the justification of political violence in Japan
Funding institution: DAAD
Grant: 6.060 EUR
Period: 01/2025 - 12/2025
Role: Principal Investigator
Partner: Prof. Dr. Airo Hino (Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan)
This project aims to investigate the prevalence of and motivations behind extremist political attitudes and the justification of political violence in Japan, an area that remains under-researched despite a number of notable incidents of political violence in recent years. By conducting an original survey in Japan in 2025, the project will adapt and test existing survey constructs developed in Western Europe and the United States to the Japanese context. This involves translating and culturally adapting measures of extremist attitudes and justifications for violence, as well as developing survey experiments to capture implicit extremist beliefs.
Growing into politics under material hardship: The impact of socio-economic problems on political socialization
Funding institution: DFG
Grant: 319.900 EUR
Period: 08/2023 - 07/2026
Role: Principal Investigator
Partner: Prof. Dr. Paul Marx (University of Bonn)
A large literature recognizes a strong socio-economic gradient in political involvement. Voting turnout and other forms of engaging with politics tend to be lower among the poor. While this results in an unequal representation of their voices in the political process, we still know little about the precise mechanism that contribute to political apathy among citizens with low income. The proposed project will address this gap by studying the link between socio-economic problems and political involvement in a life-course perspective. The guiding question is to what extent the link between both variables should be thought of as a direct, causal one; or whether rich and poor primarily differ in their political involvement because they make different socialization experiences in their youth and childhood. Theoretically, the project builds on two core findings in previous research. First, according to the “impressionable years” hypothesis, political behaviours and orientations are comparatively malleable until early adulthood and become increasingly resilient afterwards. Socio-economic problems could thus affect political involvement at young age, but lose explanatory power during the process of habituation in prime age. Secondly, parents have been shown to influence their children through political learning and through status transmission, which contributes to participatory inequality already before voting age. The socio-economic gradient typically observed in cross-sectional data could thus be largely attributable to family background and childhood experiences.Empirically, the project makes use of large-scale panel survey data. In particular, it includes studies which survey children already at a very young age (starting at age 9). Such rarely used samples allow us to investigate a period in people’s lives where socio-economic experiences might lay (or impair) crucial foundations for growing into politics. Methodologically, we employ latent growth curve modeling to study the development of political involvement over the life-course, difference-in-difference matching techniques to identify the causal effect of individual life-experiences on political involvement, and sequence analysis to discover trajectories of socio-economic problems and political involvement.
Political and religious extremism: Measuring and explaining explicit and implicit attitudes
Funding institution: DFG
Grant: 459.672 EUR
Period: 09/2020 - 09/2026
Role: Principal Investigator
Partner: Prof. Dr. Marc Helbling (University of Mannheim)
While there is already a lot of research on right-wing populist parties and populist attitudes, there is surprisingly little research on political and religious extremism that not only rejects the liberal forms of democracy as populists do, but democracy altogether. Such extremist attitudes can be found among the political right and left, but also religious groups who claim that religious rules are more relevant than the constitutions in their countries. For instance, over the last two decades many European countries have seen an increase of their Muslim population among which a considerable part can also be defined as religious extremists. Furthermore, we do not know whether causes for extremism are virtually the same, regardless of ideology or religious affiliation, or whether they are heavily dependent upon the ideological context they are attached to. And finally, we also witness a growing political divide between mainstream and extreme parties across Europe. Thus far, we know very little about how such political divides transcend into social realities and how individuals react to political polarization.The first aim of this project is to develop for the first time a survey-based instrument that allows us to measure the similarities and differences between the various forms of political and religious extremism. Given the problem of social desirability bias in this field we also propose for the first time to measure implicit extremist attitudes by means of an Implicit Association Test. Thus we can investigate (1) how to conceptualize and measure extremism attitudinally and assess the potential of left-wing, right-wing as well as Christian and Muslim religious extremism among the public. The second aim is to compare explanatory factors of extremist views and to analyze how different forms of extremism can be explained by similar or diverging factors. Therefore, we can assess (2) how causes and consequences of these extremisms relate to each other. Finally, the third aim is to study the relationship between these extremist groups as well as between extremists and non-extremists. This allows us to investigate (3) how extremists are perceived by others and to what extent the tensions that exist between political parties are reflected at the individual level and thus constitute social tensions that become relevant in daily life. To test our arguments two surveys will be conducted in Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain with 1’500 natives and 500 Muslims.
Education and Participation
Funding institution: Internationale Bodensee-Hochschule (IBH)
Grant: 159.980 EUR
Period: 07/2019 - 12/2021
Role: Project leader Germany
Partner: Prof. Dr. Gudrun Quenzel (PH Vorarlberg, PI), Prof. Dr. Michael Beck (University of St.Gallen)
The project builds on the ideas of John Dewey (1916/1989), Jürgen Habermas (1992) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (Unicef 1989, § 12) and assumes that democracy must be learned and that the institution of school is an ideal place for this learning process. The project therefore focuses on the school environment and, within the framework of a tri-national youth study (n=3000) and in-depth case analyses (n=7), examines where participation takes place in schools, how democracy can be learned in schools and aims to disseminate the basic findings on the possibilities of practical democratic learning in such a way that a participation spiral can be set in motion. In this way, the project makes a contribution to social learning that transcends national borders and thus also to the activation and democratization of the Lake Constance region. The scientific results obtained as part of the project, as well as the findings from the practice-oriented formats, are directly incorporated into teacher training and further education, enable further comparative country research and form the basis for the (further) development of participatory didactic formats. The dissemination of the project results to specific target groups and the direct incorporation of the findings into the education and training programs of the participating project partners ensure the dissemination and consolidation of the findings. Furthermore, a common database will be created, which can also make the Lake Constance region a study and model region for the extended scientific community.