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2022 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel

6. The Distribution of Extremist Attitudes Within German Society

verfasst von : Sebastian Jungkunz

Erschienen in: The Nature and Origins of Political Extremism In Germany and Beyond

Verlag: Springer International Publishing

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Abstract

This chapter looks at how widespread extremist attitudes are in Germany. There are two major implications: First, there is a huge difference between individual far left-wing and far right-wing attitudes and having an actual extremist worldview. Whereas support for some attitudes like socialism, nationalism, or anti-immigrant sentiments is rather high, it is rather low for others like nationalization of important industries, anti-Semitism, and especially anti-democratic attitudes. This makes it even more pressing to consider a multitude of LWE and RWE indicators to capture these phenomena. That said, the share of citizens with an extremist worldview is quite low. Between 1994 and 2017, the proportion of respondents with a pronounced support for LWE fluctuates between one percent in the west and three to seven percent in the east. Similarly, the share of citizens with a substantial degree of RWE support varies between one and three percent in west Germany and two and six percent in east Germany. Secondly, there are strong regional differences when it comes to political extremism in Germany. We see much higher levels of support for LWE and RWE in the east on almost all individual attitudes as well as on a combined index.

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Vorheriges Kapitel Measuring Extremist Attitudes

Nächstes Kapitel The Origins of Political Extremism

The figures shown here do not constitute the entire span of left-wing extremist attitudes, as in some cases there was no data available for multiple years.

The high approval rate overall is probably also a result of the question wording, which is rather weak. As I argued above, it would have been desirable to have items that address the perception of socialism as absolute truth. Such items do, unfortunately, not exist. Just for reference, about three percent of east and west Germans strongly agreed on a seven-point scale that only socialism can solve all problems in 1997. In 2003, six (west) and ten percent (east) strongly disagreed on a seven-point scale that “The past has shown that socialism cannot be realized.” Thus I would expect that the absolute levels of agreement with socialism are somewhat exaggerated.

In particular, it was asked about whether the United States has ruined the world economy by incurring massive debt and whether U.S. speculators have destroyed the values of the social market economy. In that case both items were combined to a mean index. If we used the former issue, strong approval would be slightly lower as compared to the index. In the latter case it would be slightly higher.

In 2003 question wording changed to whether real democracy is only possible if there is no more capitalism.

Even though the question wording differs, it both contains a reference to capitalism. Especially in 2009 this phrase seems to have a very large impact, since 92 percent of voters for the Left Party approved of the statement with the phrase “capitalist economic system” in it compared to only 64 percent if the word “capitalist” was omitted. Nevertheless, the data points are not connected to illustrate the difference in question wording.

The difference between 2003 and 2004/2014 can also partly be attributed to a difference in the number of response options. In 2003, the question was asked on a seven-point scale, whereas the ALLBUS used four-point scales for 2004 and 2014. Yet, even if we aggregate the top two response options in 2003, this still amounts to only 16 percent support in west Germany and 20 percent in the east.

The Mitte-Studien are biannual surveys on right-wing extremism in Germany from 2002 onward. They were conducted by the University of Leipzig (Decker & Brahler, 2005, 2006, 2008; Decker et al., 2003, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016; see also Kiess et al., 2016) and the University of Bielefeld (Zick & Klein, 2014; Zick et al., 2016). As the published works from 2002 and 2004 contained only a summary measure for the two highest support categories, I present the data from 2006 onward.

The figures are quite stable even if we look at similar issues for the respective attitudes. For glorification of National Socialism, this includes items like “The crimes of National Socialism have been greatly exaggerated” or “National Socialism also had positive aspects”, for anti-Semitism the items “More than other people, Jews use dirty tricks to achieve their goals” and “The Jews have something peculiar about them and don’t really fit in with us” and for social Darwinism “Just as in nature, the strongest in a society should always get their way” and “There is worthy and unworthy life.”

The difference between the data used for the present work and the Mitte-Studien results most likely from a change in the mode of data collection. The studies at the University of Leipzig, from 2006 to 2012 and in early 2014 and 2016, all used face-to-face interviews, whereas most other studies prior to 2012 and the Mitte-Studien undertaken by the University of Bielefeld (second data point in 2014 and 2016) used telephone interviews. Even though the questionnaire was handed to the respondent in the Mitte-Studien, it is likely that the presence of a foreigner could stimulate social desirability bias. This argument could, of course, also be made for all the other attitudes. However, I assume that these items are much stronger in their meaning and only a marginal fraction of hardline right-wing extremists agrees with them anyway.

Shown are only averages for Germany as a whole due to readability issues. In general, support is somewhat higher in east Germany as compared to the west.

Between 1991 and 1995, roughly 150,000 to almost 400,000 refugees of former Yugoslavian countries fled to Germany due to (civil) war. Similarly, about 100,000 migrants came to Germany in 1998 and 1999 as a result of the war in Kosovo. These numbers decreased massively from 2000 onward, with yearly numbers circulating around 25,000–50,000 (Alscher et al., 2015).

Antipathy is the strongest for the long-term unemployed followed by ethnic and religious minorities. Discrimination against the homeless, women, and people with disabilities is considerably lower.

Support for the statement “We should have a leader who rules Germany with a firm hand to the benefit of all” yields slightly higher approval rates.

Technically, all items were first rescaled to a range from zero to one. Afterward I created a mean index for the left-wing (and right-wing) items that again ranged from zero to one. This index was then multiplied by the anti-democracy item. The cutoff was set at 0.6 (on a scale from zero to one), which is equal to someone indicating (strong) support on all individual items and at least strong support on one item.

The correlation with the left-right scale ranges from –0.15 to 0.15 for LWE and 0.04 to 0.26 for RWE. In line with the results from above, this shows that the left-right scale is not suited to gauge extremist opinion. The anti-democratic dimension especially is heavily neglected.

For reference, earlier studies from the 1970s and 1980s estimated that roughly twelve percent of the German population have left-wing extremist attitudes and six percent right-wing extremist attitudes (Infratest Wirtschaftsforschung GmbH, 1980; Noelle-Neumann & Ring, 1984).

More precisely, they used 18 items that were measured on a five-point scale with high values representing full agreement with the right-wing statement. The authors calculated a sum index and counted all those that scored 63 or higher as right-wing extremist, which comes to a mean value of 3.5 across all scales.

I removed all electoral districts with fewer than ten respondents in order to reduce the bias of potential outliers. Nevertheless, those excluded from the figure mostly show a similar pattern in both parts of the country. The 1998 data shows a similar picture, but as there were fewer respondents per district in the data set, I refrain from showing these results here. Furthermore, there were no shapefiles available from the Bundeswahlleiter or elsewhere for 1994 in order to map the distribution of respondents.

There are 44 respondents per electoral district on average in 2017.

This pattern is more or less the same in 2009 and 2013 but to a lesser degree. For the sake of brevity, I did not show separate figures for these years.

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Titel: The Distribution of Extremist Attitudes Within German Society
verfasst von: Sebastian Jungkunz
Verlag: Springer International Publishing
Buch: The Nature and Origins of Political Extremism In Germany and Beyond
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-83335-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-83336-7

Copyright-Jahr: 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83336-7_6