Stigmatizing the Radical Right, 2024

Balcells, Laia and Martínez, Sergi and Valentim, Vicente and vanderWilden, Ethan (2024). Stigmatizing the Radical Right, 2024. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857529

The project is organised around three thematic areas: (i) how trust within and between social groups and towards governance institutions emerges and evolves in contexts of rising inequality; (ii) how trust in unequal societies shapes governance outcomes through two intervening factors - political behaviour and social mobilisation; and (iii) the pathways through which changes in such intervening factors may sometimes result in inclusive governance outcomes, but in the breakdown of governance at other times. Each of these areas will incorporate detailed theoretical and empirical analyses at the subnational level in four countries - Colombia, Mozambique, Pakistan and Spain - affected by rising inequalities and characterised by unstable or strained democratic institutions. The absence of systematic qualitative, quantitative and behavioural data has hindered progress in understanding the links between inequality, trust and governance in countries outside North America and Western Europe. The project seeks to compile a number of unexplored data sources and collect new data comparatively across these other countries in order to fulfil this critical gap. This data collection will involve: (i) comparative individual-level surveys to understand contemporaneous levels of trust, and attitudes towards formal and non-formal local governing institutions, (ii) behavioural experiments under different inequality and political contexts to better understand the formation of trust under different scenarios, (iii) indepth interviews with key political actors in government, members of social movements and citizen organisations to understand how inequalities affect perceptions of governance and strategies of political mobilisation, and (iv) detailed compilation of archival data that will allow us to better understand how inequalities and attitudes have evolved across time and how different historical junctures may shape the governance outcomes we observe today.

Data description (abstract)

Radical right behavior and support for radical right parties have increased across many countries in recent decades. A growing body of research has argued that, similar to the spread of other extremist behaviors, this is due to an erosion of political norms against supporting these parties. This dataset includes measures of stigma against Vox, a radical right party in Spain. It also randomly assigns respondents to one of four treatment vignettes that plausibly stigmatize the party. Results from these data have been used in a working paper written by the dataset creators: ‘Stigmatizing the radical right,’ which documents how different text-based cues of stigma affect the how individuals perceive the radical right.

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