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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, dziblatt@g.harvard.edu.
Hanno Hilbig, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Davis, United States, hhilbig@ucdavis.edu.
Daniel Bischof, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Aarhus University, Denmark, bischof@ps.au.dk.
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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.

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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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