Shameful Preferences and the Legitimization of Europe’s Far Right

Thursday, April 13, 2017
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
(Pacific)
William J. Perry Conference Room
Encina Hall, Second Floor, Central, C231
616 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305
Speaker: 
  • Laura Jakli

Abstract:

As the number of migrants in Europe has risen in recent years, far right parties have fuelled voters’ fears concerning what the influx will mean for their nations. This project utilizes paired pre-election polls and actual vote shares across state and regional elections pre- and postmigrant crisis to provide evidence that far right sympathists often practiced preference falsification prior to this legitimizing shock, but that the crisis reshaped the political conversation such that far right identification is no longer deemed politically shameful. Although the theoretical framework surrounding preference falsification is well developed in the social movement literature as well as in American politics, Laura Jakli argues that it has untapped parallels in the study of Europe's far right. She also embeds priming and list experiments in a Facebook survey to determine whether there is a significant difference between subjects' willingness to identify with the far right using explicit versus implicit measurement approaches.

 

Speaker Bio:

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headshot jakli
Laura Jakli is a PhD student and FLAS fellow at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of modern European politics and political behavior. She has designed and implemented field experiments, internet-based survey experiments, and interview-based research in the US, Greece, and Hungary. Her dissertation examines the relationship between digital media polarization and individual-level attitude strength as well as aggregate-level electoral mobilization. The overall goal of her dissertation is to explain why recent far right voter turnout has been remarkably high relative to the underlying distribution of ideological adherents across the West. She holds a BA from Cornell University and an MA from UC Berkeley.