Episode 7: Vicente Valentim on the Normalization of the Radical Right

This is the political science podcast, no problem at all. Welcome back to another episode. And welcome to you, Julius, who's hosting this podcast with me. The voice you just heard is from Victor Brogie, and my name is Julius Curlser, welcome to this episode. The idea of this podcast is to talk to scholars of political science and the research and how it relates to current political events. In today's episode, we talk to the Centvalent team. He is a system professor of political science at IE University in Madrid. He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in Florence and was a price research fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. There's research focuses on political behavior, social norms and the radical riot. In 2024, he published a book, the normalization of the radical riot, a norm theory of political supply and demand, which is mostly based on his PhD thesis. Book won several prizes and opens a new perspective on explaining growing support for radical right parties, so we basically had to speak to him about it. In September, you gave a talk in Zurich, and there you started with an interesting observation about current explanations of the success of the radical right. What was that observation and what was the motivation to write your book? What did you want to do differently in your approach? The key motivation for writing this book is that I think there's a mismatch between some empirical patterns and the way that we typically explain the rise of the radical right and actually some other political behaviors that we can talk about later on. This mismatch basically consists in the fact that we typically use explanations for this phenomenon that are fairly fast moving, such as economic change and cultural change, really. So economic change would be about structural changes in the economy, which makes some voters feel left behind, and that's why they engage in radical right behavior. Cultural change would be about perceived changes in the dominant values in one society, which makes some voters backlash against these values, and then also engage in radical right behavior. As I was saying, both of these explanations are fairly slow moving. They change in the long term, but not necessarily so much in the short term. This is in contrast with what we observe when we look into vote shares for radical right parties, which often actually grow very fast. So I had this plot with which I start the book and also the presentation that you saw in Zurich, where I plot the vote share for a number of radical right parties in the first elections that they run for, and there what you can observe is that oftentimes radical right parties go from really virtually 0% of the vote to 10, 15 or even 20% of the vote in just a couple of elections. And so the puzzle that motivates this book is this mismatch between, on the one hand, as putting emphasis on slow moving transformations as an explanation for radical right support. And on the other hand, the observation that typically when these parties appear, their support grows very fast. And that is where you talk about this distinction between intrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivations. That's right. Yes, that's correct. So the way I try to then move to my argument is by saying that we typically focus on these intrinsic motivations. And basically what I mean there is attitudes or preferences, you know, these are slightly different. We can talk about that. At the end of the day they do refer to what someone thinks politically, you know, their views of politics, et cetera. So the idea there, and I think in much of previous work not only on the radical right, but really on political behavior more generally, is that if someone's political behavior has changed, if they went from voting from one party to another, if they went from not voting to voting or vice versa, if they went from not protesting to protesting or vice versa, this typically is explained on the basis of these intrinsic motivations have also changed. Their attitudes or preferences have also changed. And what I try to do in this book is to shift focus from these intrinsic motivations to extrinsic motivations. So things that are not within individuals if you only think about it that way, but the characteristics of the social setting where they live and where they have interactions which can also affect their political behavior. And namely, what I'm looking at here are social norms which basically consist of, you know, informal rules of behavior, but that really come down to the perceptions of what one is expected to do in a given setting. Social norms are something that happens to be really outside of politics. You know, they are the informal rules that dictate how we dress, how we talk to each other if we see someone we know on the street, all these kinds of interactions, you know. And we can talk about a number of other social norms if you're interested. But the idea in the book is that there are also social norms that generate perceptions that some political behaviors are more acceptable than others. And crucially to the point of the book, it is often the case that individuals have this perception that radical right views are deemed unacceptable or undesirable. And this gives them incentive to oftentimes show these views and what this also suggests is that they can go from not acting in radical right ways to acting in radical right ways, not because their views have changed, not because they went from not being radical right to being radical right, but simply because they went from thinking that these radical right views that they already had were deemed unacceptable to thinking that they have become more acceptable. Okay, so you're going right into the concrete mechanisms of your book and your argument. And I was wondering if you can lay this out a bit more, how does the erosion of social norms affect electoral support for foreign parties? I mean, in the book you have this stage model where there are like different stages, but something happens. Maybe you can go into bit more detail there. Yeah, so the key argument in the book is that this reason increase in radical right behavior in many Western democracies is not necessarily, as I was saying, a product of there being more radical right voters. It is also at least partly a product of voters who are radical right already feeling more comfortable acting on their views. And so what I argue is that the radical right went through what I call a process of normalization and this is the three step process that you are referring to where in the initial stages of this process before the radical right was actually intellectually successful, you were in the situation where there were strong social norms against expressing radical right views which meant that even many voters who actually did have these views in private would often not disclose them in public because they were afraid of being judged by others losing some social connections, etc. And so what this meant was that voters underestimated how many others, how many other people that they knew shared these radical right views. And also politicians, so on the political supply side level, also underestimated how many voters had these views in their society and this meant that actually many politicians would think there was no point running for politics on a radical platform because they would probably not be successful and the radical right ended up with leaders that were less skilled if I'm having to talk more about what that means but basically they didn't have the type of skill that made voters think that they could be intellectually successful which meant that many voters might have these views in private but they still wouldn't vote for these politicians because they thought they would be wasting their vote. And so this happens, the radical right remains electorally and successful and this is kind of a circular situation where the two things reinforce each other, right? So the low electoral support reinforces the political stigma and the political stigma reinforces the low electoral support for the radical right. Now for this to change the argument in the book is that you need to move from this space which I call the latency phase to something that I call the activation phase where really what changes is that someone who has these political skills realizes that actually there are more voters in their society that have these radical right views than typically meets the eye and in so realizing they actually have an incentive to be the first skilled politician to put these issues on the agenda and when they do that because they are more skilled they would typically collect the votes of these individuals who were radical right already but were not voting for a radical right party because they thought there was no point doing so. And then if they become successful then it's actually their success that moves societies to this last phase in the process of normalization which is what I call the surfacing phase. And in this phase really what happens is that once these radical right politicians become successful then because they were successful voters realize that there's many others like them in society which means that they are happier or well not happier but they are more comfortable expressing their views in public and on the other hand also other politicians realize that actually there is a contingent of radical right voters in their society that can be mobilized to gather electoral support which means that there are also more politicians that will join radical right party. So, suddenly you're in a different equilibrium, but one that is also self-reinforcing, you know, and now your society has moved to this situation where the higher electoral support and the lower political stigma of the radical right also reinforce each other. Yeah, so, as you just said, initial precondition for the erosion of social norms is that far-right parties have skilled candidates or, as you call them, political entrepreneurs who make their parties more legible. And I was wondering how does this argument speak to the whole literature on the importance of far-right candidates because what I know for my experience is actually that the specific candidates of far-right parties are actually not that important to the supporters, right? I mean, there's this big literature from this 2000s arguing, okay? The return of the führer importance, right? That radical right parties have so-called führers, like the Nazi's parties back then. But what I know is that actually it's not that important for the supporters' parties who is actually the candidate that they're voting for. I guess it depends what you mean by it being important who they vote for. There's, of course, the argument here is that having this skill leader is important in moving from an equilibrium where the radical right is not successful to moving to an equilibrium where they are successful and the stigma is lower. Different dynamics could happen afterwards and after the party exists and is established and normalized. It could be the case that the leader doesn't matter so much after that stage. But still, you know, to the extent that I can test this kind of thing in the book, I do show that radical right leaders that have some proxies of politicians killed typically do better in elections, especially when they have just moved to this party. So, you know, it's not to go against this literature, but it is to say that maybe they could be capturing something different than this initial moment when these new entrepreneurs joined this parties because that's really what is key to the argument is that they are crucial in making this change between the two equilibrium. Yeah, it's important in which stage actually the candidates are important and use their skill to make their parties more legible. Victor, you had another question, I guess. Yeah, so the point here is sort of that these political entrepreneurs discover the potential or like realize the potential of a party and then make it sort of jump over this threshold? Yes, exactly. The idea is that because they realize that there are probably more radical right voters in their society than typically meets the eye, they will have an incentive to be the first skilled politician to put these issues in the agenda. And you know, this builds on literature, on political entrepreneurship, you know, namely work by Catherine de Ries and Sarah Hobold. And the argument there is that of course, it's hard to break through in politics, right? There's already established parties, it's hard to be the new party that makes it. And one of the arguments in this literature is that one of the key ways by which someone who is not already established in politics can make that breakthrough is by finding these new dimensions, these new topics of political conflict that they can put in the agenda. And so the argument here is that in the setting where there is no radical right party that has had electoral success already, this is putting those issues in the agenda is one of the key ways by which political entrepreneurs can be successful. With the idea being that again, if you are not already established in politics, you're always trying to find these dimensions of conflict that could appeal to voters but are not already being politicized. And again, if you think that oftentimes even before the radical right is successful, the world voters who had these views, then tapping on those views as a political candidate could be one of the crucial ways by which you can then make this electoral breakthrough. So we move to concrete examples because there are plenty of them in the book. I have again a question on the role of salience in this regard because I mean, you're basically saying that as you just let out attitudes and preference are more stable and they don't change that fast to explain a rapid growth in electoral support for all parties. But I mean, there's also a little chart talking about the role of salience. I have to think about on paper, around people, around Nguyen Goodrong who said, yeah, okay, it's actually not a change in voters' attitudes, but the voters play a small priority on cultural issues like immigration and vote on the base of these issues. And there's not so no change in attitudes, but a change in support, right? When I was talking about the two explanations, the economic and cultural explanation in the beginning, I could have added this third one about saliency. I actually discussed it in the book in that section. The reason why I don't often talk about it is that I think it is not as established as the economic and cultural explanation. That's actually one of the key contributions of this paper that you're talking about by Nguyen Goodrong and co-authors is that I really put this, I think, in the agenda. The way I think about it is that as I was saying, cultural and economic explanations are fairly slow moving. And, you know, if you were to explain a process based on them, you would either explain stability or long-term change, but you would struggle to explain something as fast as the rising radical right support often is. And I think an explanation focused on salience or salience alone often faces the opposite issue, which is that I think they would expect too much variation then more variation than what we actually see. I know we'll talk about concrete examples in a second, but if you think of a case like Germany, I think it is plausible to say that the increased salience of migration and asylum seeking applications during the refugee crisis was key in propelling the FD to intellectual success. But then as salience of these issues goes down, the party is still there and it's established and it's not going anywhere. And so the way I think about this is that I think salience is actually part of what could do some of the work in this activation phase in this phase where you go from one equilibrium to the other. It is, or it could be because the salience of a given issue goes up that politicians get some cues from the electorate that actually maybe there are some radical right views in their society. They are not being mobilized by existing political parties, but then really what changes in the long term is that after this peak in salience there's a more skilled politician that joins the radical right and then once they become successful norms have changed and we are in a very different setting. And that's why we observe this basically move from two different equilibria, one where there's a strong stigma against the radical right and the radical right doesn't have noticeable electoral support to one where the radical right has a lot more electoral support is here to say is going nowhere and the stigma has gone down. So then actually moving to an example because you already mentioned Germany, we talked also about the rise of the AFD in the in the episode with Kai Artsheimer, but what is your view on this early stage especially talking about political entrepreneurship and these skilled leaders? How do you see the early years of the AFD in that regard? I mean as much of Kai's own work shows, the AFD when it was for me wasn't really a radical right party, it became a radical right party in this moment when the refugee crisis was at its height and so the and there's a change of leadership and that's when the party becomes clearly a radical right party. And the argument in the book because Germany is one of the cases that I study is that this is really what the political entrepreneurship that we were talking about before is all about. So there's a set of highly skilled individuals, these are individuals who have high socioeconomic status, who have some key economic positions in German society before the joined politics were highly educated, etc. These are all different proxies of skill we can discuss which are better, but I think however way you look into that it is clear that these individuals were highly skilled and so what they do is they take over an existing party and they shift it to the right right again because in that moment in I guess German history there were some signs that were suggesting maybe this is actually something that you couldn't profit from electorally. And so again what they end up doing is capitalizing on these votes from individuals who are radical right already and who now have you know at the skill position that is putting their issues in the agenda and just to talk a bit more about data one of the things that I show in the book is that before the AFD exists in Germany even individuals who are willing to admit that they are radical right in the survey were actually not more likely to vote for one of the pre-existing read the right parties that were individuals of other ideologies. But once the FD comes into the political scene, these individuals who are willing to admit being ready-correct become significantly much more likely to vote for the FD. So what this suggests is that these new politicians who were in a different party, the FD, putting forward ready-correct claims were able to mobilize these voters who were there, but who were previously not voting for a ready-correct party. And this is where they move to stage three of your process. Exactly. So then they are able to collect these votes, they get electoral success, and after they get this electoral success, then voters who had these views already realized that there's many like them in society, otherwise these politicians would not have been successful. And that means that they can more freely express their views. And again, as I said before, this also has an effect on politicians, where politicians realize that unlike what they had thought previously, maybe one can be successful even if they are running for politics on a ready-correct platform. And this is why then oftentimes you see that after the ready-correct becomes successful, there's many politicians typically from conservative parties joining the ready-correct. And this is also something that I show in the book. I'm happy to talk about that evidence. But I think just anecdotally we can think of many cases in different countries where this happens, where some politicians that had the history in the center-right party after the ready-correct becomes successful, then moves to the ready-correct. Moving on from the theoretical part to the empirical one, I was wondering. I mean, that's a big question, I know. But how do you investigate all these questions? Because it's actually, I think, from an empirical standpoint, not that easy to capture change in social norms and the effect on electoral preferences. Yeah, maybe you can talk about this a bit more. I think that's one of the key challenges in showing this type of process empirically is that the nature of the argument is about oftentimes people having some views that they are not willing to disclose in public or to others precisely because they think that these views are in an acceptable. This is something that has been called reference falsification. And of course, the reason why it's so hard to show empirically is that, by definition, it means that people have some views that they are not going to express to you. In the book, I try to find some different ways of going around this issue by trying to compare behaviors that are very similar, except that some of them are performed in private, where you can express whatever views you want because you know others won't be able to judge you or to impose any social costs on you. And a similar behavior that is performed in a more public setting where other people can observe you and as such, you should expect some social consequences. So to give you an example, one of the main measures that I use throughout the book is based on the comparison of official vote shares for parties with the idea that, you know, because voting is private, you can always vote for whoever you want. And it's very unlikely that someone will impose social costs, social consequences on you. And so comparing this official vote share against what individuals say when they are asked who did they vote for in the context of a survey interview. And the idea here is that, of course, you can vote for whoever you want. But then when someone knocks on your door and asks who did you vote for in the election last Sunday, then you will fear being judged by this person who's at your doorstep. And as such, if you think there's a social norm against saying that you voted for a radical right, party, for example, even if you vote for that party in the privacy of the voting booth, you will have an incentive not to admit that vote when someone knocks on your door and asks you to fill out a survey. And so based on this, one of the pieces of evidence that I show, for example, is that typically the declared vote share for radical right party, so the vote share that comes in this post electoral service or is that happen after an election has taken place are lower than the official vote share for parties, which, of course, you cannot know who is lying. But at the aggregate level, you can know that there are some voters who are voting for these parties or not are not admitting having done so. And I also show this doesn't typically happen with parties there are of ideologies other than the radical right. But then, crucially, to this point about the last phase in the process of normalization, I show that this gap between what individuals vote for and what the declare having done is reduced once the radical right makes it your parliament. So, these some of these voters who were voting for the radical right, but not admitting having done so, feel more comfortable admitting having voted for the radical right after these parties have become successful and have entered political institutions. I mean, it's a very interesting way to measure it, just like a quick thought that I had when I when I saw it was like in in how far do you think it might also be a little bit of a compositional effect of the polls just because of the sampling that it's that it's biased. Yeah, that's a, you know, an issue that I run into often as in when I present this work, that's a common question that people have. There's a few things that I can do in and that I try to do throughout the book to kind of show that I don't think this is what's driving it. For example, I I have some social social demographic variables of voters and I try to control for this. And then when I when I when I show this difference from before the radical right entering parliament and being under reported in service to then being in parliament and being significantly less under reported in service, I also run the same analysis having this social demographic variables as what we call placebo outcomes. So basically running the same analysis with these variables as outcomes. And the idea there would be that if this is about different composition of the samples, such that, you know, the voters that you actually contacting after the radical right is successful are different than those that are contacted before the radical right is successful. Then you should see a change in the social demographic composition of these voters. And I don't find any of that. I do want to say though, again, despite me not finding that, I think that if this were what was going on, it would still somewhat be compatible with with the argument. So if I were to find an effect there, what this would mean would be that someone who has voted for the radical right would not open the door to a survey interviewer if their party didn't make it to parliament. But if their party didn't make it to parliament, they would be happy to open the door and say that they voted for the radical right. I think this would still be compatible with with the argument because the idea there would be that you don't want to talk about your political views if your party hasn't been successful. But if your radical right party has been successful, you're happy talking about this view. So I think this would still be compatible with the argument, but of course, as I said, that's not I don't find any evidence that this is actually going on. And like the last question about this just because I found it interesting like as a footnote, basically, and I know this is not like the main topic or something you must get further there, but you basically find the the this gap between the survey and the actual election data, the other way around for left-wing parties, right? So that there is a norm to support them basically, but then the actual vote share is lower than that. Yes, I do find that. And this is especially the case when it comes to green parties. Again, I think the the mechanism here is the same. And I actually think this is evidence that is compatible with whole argument and how this measure is able to capture perceptions of what is deemed acceptable and desirable. The idea here is that there is a social norm for being green in general. There's a social norm in favor of recycling, taking the you know, taking the subway as opposed to your car, flying less, etc. And this norm also extends to green parties. And so if sometimes even if you didn't vote for a green party, you may want to say that you voted for the green party and did the you know, the socially responsible thing. So the fact that this that this gap is reversed there, I think is still in line with the argument with the idea that you want to say that you did what you think all this would like you to have done. We talked much about the German case. And I think Victor and I know a lot of things about because we're from Germany, but I was wondering what about other cases in your book? What do you say that this whole normalization process? Yeah, it applies better to a certain country than others. Other countries by this whole normalization process hasn't happened that much and other factors might explain record growth in far right support. There's basically two types of analysis in the book. One is a large and so, you know, analysis with a large number of cases that compare you know, democracies throughout the world, mostly in Europe, against one another. And so you have rather great parties as observations. And then there are some case studies here and there in in the book as well. These case studies are four. It's Germany, Portugal, Spain and the UK. Germany is the one that has the most that occupies the most space in the book because there's a full chapter on Germany alone, but there's also some pieces of evidence about the other cases. This is to say that you know, the cases that I can speak to the better and with more confidence are this for and in this for I think the you know the main building blocks of the argument are there of course there's you know there's the argument presupposes some things that can differ from case to case for example we were talking about the case of the EFT before and one of them one of the things that happens in that case is that this political entrepreneurs take over a party that already existed and they push it to the right right in other cases such as Portugal for example the political entrepreneurs didn't take over an existing party in this case it was mostly one political entrepreneur what he did was to create a new party right so these are all of this is still within the you know the the bounds of the the variation that the argument can can take on and then other one that I kind of hinted at inadvertently is that oftentimes sometimes the political entrepreneur is really just one person as is the case in Portugal sometimes it's more a group of people as was the case in Germany so there's some variation in this characteristics but still the the main argument holds in these four cases with this being said I do think you know the main building blocks of the argument applied to most of at least European countries at least the ones that I'm more familiar with but I do want to say to your point about whether there are other factors that can explain this I do want to say I I'm not trying with this book to explain the full length of increase in support for the right we can talk more about this but in general I I'm fairly skeptical of the idea that any social phenomenon is monocosal meaning that it only has one cause I don't think that's the case with anything really I don't think that's the case with the right either what I'm trying to do with this book is to hopefully highlight that there's an explanation that we haven't put a lot of emphasis in the past and that I think explains a crucial part of this phenomenon and again going back to what we were talking about before also hopefully does away with this puzzle where we know that attitudes and preferences change very slowly but we see the right right role very fast and I think this explanation can explain why this seeming contradiction is not as contradictory as it could seem at first glance but again of course economic and cultural explanations do some of the work here and I think of them as preconditions for this argument to hold this you can only have a process of normalization of the right right is over time via changes in in economic structure and cultural change you have this pocket of voters who are swayable by the radical right but haven't been swayed yet because there's no skill leader putting forward their views so this is all to say that I see my argument as complementary to other arguments not I don't want this to be read as saying you know all the other arguments are wrong and this is what explains the full length of support for the radical right no no and I also hadn't had the perception that you're trying to make such an argument and I think it also speaks nicely to to prior periods I mean Germany in the 90s we had the Republic on another right ring extremist parties entering many state parliaments and there was like a preceding period of economic uncertainty and some cultural change but then in the 90s there was a lot of norm change because on texts on on refugee homes and so on so I think this is a nice argument I wanted to move a bit to the consequences of this whole theory and your whole approach and basically what other parties can do to counter and far-right parties in the public sphere on parliaments especially mainstream conservative parties what is basically the conclusion that we can draw from your theory and the results on how to deal with the far-right I think one of the key consequences of this argument is that the radical right is here to stay and that you cannot put the genie back in the bottle if you want to think about it that way so the the argument is that what part of what happened and what kept the radical right from being successful before it actually hadn't like for breakthrough was that both voters and politicians underestimated how many citizens in their society were actually radical right and this is why all the voters wouldn't often express their views and this is also why you didn't have skilled politicians in the right because they thought there was no point running for politics with one such platform and then over through the course of the process of normalization you suddenly end up in a in a phase this last phase is surfacing phase where both voters and politicians now know that many citizens in their society are radical right and this is why voters feel more comfortable expressing their views and why politicians also join radical right parties now when you're in this stage where it is known both by voters and politicians that these voters exist in their society it's hard to think why with either voters or politicians want to go back to the previous stages and go back to not knowing that many citizens in their in their society are radical right of course for voters this would mean going back to hiding their views which is something that I guess we all know is psychologically uncomfortable we don't like that we like being able to express our views so there's no reason why they would go back and that the the politician level this would mean letting go of a contingent of voters that they know exists and can be mobilized electorally and again there's no incentive to do that the incentive is to have at least one party that is mobilizing this use all of this is say that I think oftentimes we see in the medium and also by politicians the idea that because these parties grew very fast it's just a matter of you know they're discontent with something it's all protest voting and it's all gonna go away as fast as it came I think that's very unlikely if you believe the argument here so that tells you something about not not necessarily how this can be fought but how we should interpret these trends when it comes to exactly how it should be fought I think at the risk of being too general I think that precisely because you cannot go back in this process of normalization it's not about putting these norms back in place the really sustainable way of fighting the radical right defense what you want to do is by really over the long term changing the views of citizens so the process of normalization was one where you know that was important political change without necessarily a change in views just by via changing norms but the way forward again if your goal is to fight the radical right has to be by changing the views of voters so instead of blocking the views that they have from translating into behavior of course how can this be done is a more complicated question and one that I don't really study empirically in the book but I think based on other people's work it seems that something that is fairly promising our for example education campaigns it's quite a bit of work from Anya Noindor for example that seems to suggest that education is really one of the ways by which you can get citizens to espouse pro-democratic views and it makes sense because you know we know that education has a lot of important effects but also typically that's that's something that happens when you're in your teenage years or something which we know from psychological literature that's also when your views crystallize right so this is something that we should be thinking of quite a bit and I think there's also some you know some work that suggests that kind of reframing how we think of in groups and out groups and how we think of out groups as threatening which is key to the reason why individuals develop radical right views and and so kind of breaking this dichotomy between in groups and out groups and the idea that the latter are frightening and threatening can also go a long way in terms of kind of dealing with the psychological mechanisms by which someone develops radical right views so I think these are a couple of ways that based on prior research seemed somewhat promising but I think in general as I was saying the key should be we need to think how can we change these views as opposed to thinking well now that those views are there let's block the translation of those views into behavior and this would be for example forbidding parties or or things like that this is good working in the short term but in the long term there's no reason why individuals would actually change their views just because they don't have a party that they can vote for again this could win some time as you change those views but this should not be thought of as something that can stably tackle the problem in the long term I mean the the whole discussion about like banning a party this is a very double edged sword right but for a moment I would like to talk about the the role of other parties in relation to the radical right there is work on party competition by Tariq Abuchadi and others which highlights this role of the mainstream right if they move to to the right further to the radical right on the cultural issues that this then actually helps the radical right and like this is also something we could talk about when thinking about social norms right that you say oh there is a very accepted mainstream party and now they shift to the right and could also help in in establishing like for example an anti-immigrant norm what is your view? and that? This is not something that I study in the book per se, but I have a follow-up working paper with Elias Innis and then Ziblat where we actually look into this question precisely and there what we're looking at is what is the effect again on social norms, on perceptions of what is acceptable of having the the center right making the type of anti-immigrant statements that you associate with the redic right or having the redic right make those same statements. And what we find when we compare the effect of similar statements being made by the center and the redic right is that actually when the center right makes a type of statements they erode these norms even more than if those statements are made by the redic right. We can talk a bit about why we think that is, in the paper we say it's probably because center rights are center right parties are larger electorally they're perceived as you know more democratic etc but the key point here is that regardless of the electoral effects that you were talking about in Tariqa which at this work for example there's also an important effect when it comes to the normalization of xenophobia really because that's what we study in in the paper when it comes to center right parties moving to the positions of the redic right. So I think there's typically a lot of discussion on is this profitable for the center right in terms of gaining back votes and or not and Tariq's work seems to suggest that's not the case but what we want to say in this paper is look even if that were the case there would still be another dimension where this would be undesirable for society as a whole which is even if it could win back the votes of the redic right which doesn't seem to be the case you would still erode these norms and so you know we would have to have a normative discussion about is it worth gaining back those votes if you're making something like xenophobia seem more acceptable. So all of this is say that I think you know the evidence suggests that center right parties should not be doing this but of course some of other work by Tariq also suggests that this is typically how they react even though that's not profitable both from an electoral perspective and from a social norms perspective. You already touched a bit on this and I was wondering what are other consequences from the erosion of social norms beyond just voting and political preferences. Yeah in the book I make this distinction between what I call private political behaviors and public political behaviors. Private political behaviors include things like voting I think that's the the most important one in political science. Public political behaviors include anything from expressing redic right views in a conversation trying to convince someone else of the positions of the redic right to going out and protesting in favor of a redic right position having a party symbol engaging in conversations online where your name is visible all these types of political behaviors. Now once the redic right becomes normalized really what this means the way I define it is that individuals feel more comfortable engaging in this type of public behavior. So what you would expect is that once the redic right makes an intellectual breakthrough individuals should be more comfortable going to a far right protest for example expressing redic right views in a family dinner and also in the limits engaging in crimes against migrants for example. And I think there's some work to suggest this for example in the book I do show that the more normalized the redic right is the more redic right protest there are after an election there are some and you know and it totally we can think of some cases in European countries where after a redic right success there were important protests there's also some work to suggest that after there's a redic right electoral victory there's also more hate crimes so I think all of these processes could be explained by a change in social norms and I think we can agree that they are very consequential. And then already coming to an end here you briefly mentioned that you are you doing having a working paper right now with two co-authors on the role of the mainstream right. Is there anything else like are you doing more research right now in that realm of norm shifting or are you working on other projects we always like to ask our guests this at the end of the episode. I am working on this topic I am moving to slightly different questions where the comment thread is the social norms part more than the the redic right part but a few questions that I'm interested in now are first what norms exist in politics beyond norms against the redic right in some contexts it's not only or not even redic right parties there are stigmatized but it could be other parties and so what are the historical roots of these types of political stigmatized what unites them how can we understand how they come into being so that's one line of research that I have some work on and the other line is trying to think about if there are typically social norms in politics if there are perceptions of what is acceptable and what is less acceptable where do these perceptions come from and what keeps those perceptions in place. And I have some work with a co-author I'm Alia Alvarez Ben Humea some of it has been published recently but some of it is ongoing where we try to look into the effect of what is typically called social sanctions in keeping political norms in place so the idea that if you do something that is politically unacceptable there will be some social consequences such as people avoiding future interactions with you or gossiping about you or all these things that we don't like to happen and that basically this is incentivized future expressions of that political preference. All right we're looking forward to reading and hearing more from you on these topics that was the seventh episode of no problem at all thank you very much for coming to the show we sent and thank you guys for listening. Thanks for having me. Goodbye. Well thanks so much. If you enjoyed this episode please share the podcast and read it on Spotify or wherever you listen to it. This helps us to promote the podcast. 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