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Wealth of Tongues: Why Peripheral Regions Vote for the Radical Right in Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 October 2023

DANIEL ZIBLATT ,
HANNO HILBIG Open the ORCID record for HANNO HILBIG [Opens in a new window]  and
DANIEL BISCHOF Open the ORCID record for DANIEL BISCHOF [Opens in a new window]
DANIEL ZIBLATT*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, United States, and WZB, Germany
HANNO HILBIG*
Affiliation:
University of California, Davis, United States
DANIEL BISCHOF*
Affiliation:
Aarhus University, Denmark
*
Corresponding author: Daniel Ziblatt, Eaton Professor of the Science of Government, Department of Government, Harvard University, United States, and Director, Transformation of Democracy, WZB, Germany, [email protected].
Hanno Hilbig, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, United States, [email protected].
Daniel Bischof, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, [email protected].
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Abstract

Why is support the radical right higher in some geographic locations than others? This article argues that what is frequently classified as the “rural” bases of radical-right support in previous research is in part the result of something different: communities that were in the historical “periphery” in the center–periphery conflicts of modern nation-state formation. Inspired by a classic state-building literature that emphasizes the prevalence of a “wealth of tongues”—or nonstandard linguistic dialects in a region—as a definition of the periphery, we use data from more than 725,000 geo-coded responses in a linguistic survey in Germany to show that voters from historically peripheral geographic communities are more likely to vote for the radical right today.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 118 , Issue 3 , August 2024 , pp. 1480 - 1496
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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