Right voting in times of material inequality and mass migration in Germany
Florian Hertel

Invitation to Colloquium Series "Global Migration as the New Social Question"
Sociology of Transnationalization, Development and Migration
Wednesday, July 12, 16-18 c.t.
Room: X-C3-107

Capitalizing on recent immigration, the AfD, the most recent political reincarnation of Germany’s ultra-right, successfully made inroads in German state elections sending members to 10 of the 16 state parliaments.

At the same time, PEGIDA, an association that organizes regular anti-immigrant demonstrations in Dresden since fall 2014, has been the most successful right social movement since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany. Reliable evidence about the characteristics of individuals to vote for or identify as extreme right is however scant.

The presentation rests on an empirical study on the socio-demographics of extreme right party identification in Germany since 1990. Employing data from the Socio- Economic Panel (SOEP), we study the objective (demographic, socio-economic) and subjective (attitudes and preferences) attributes characterizing Germans that switch to right-party identification. Additionally, we ask whether right-wing identification is also the result of inter- and intragenerational social mobility as suggested by several recent publications like, e.g., Die Abstiegsgesellschaft or Returning to Reims.

Florian Hertel is a senior researcher at the University of Hamburg where he studies the causes and effects of class and educational inequalities. In 2016, Florian was Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He is specifically interested in understanding changing inequalities and their reproduction across generations from a national and cross-national perspective. Florian studied the covariation of intergenerational mobility and occupational structural change, deindustrialization or educational expansion, multigenerational and intragenerational mobility and the evolution of poverty from a longitudinal perspective. He has published