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.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | American Political Science Review |
| Volume | 118 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1480-1496 |
| Number of pages | 17 |
| ISSN | 0003-0554 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Aug 2024 |