This project had three main scientific achievements. First, SODIS completed interviews with members of extreme-right movement parties in three countries: Hungary, Italy, and Sweden. Second, SODIS did manage to gather insight into the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on far-right organisations, only not to a degree that would be publishable. Finally, SODIS gathered first-hand information and quotations on far-right conspiracy theories, especially those surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic.
The SODIS project involved collecting survey responses from members of far-right organisations in four countries: Italy, Hungary, Sweden, and Spain. Survey was completed and translated into Spanish, Hungarian, Italian, and Swedish with the help of research assistants. Throughout the translation process the survey was constantly updated to ensure consistency was maintained given the variations in language. Surveys were then uploaded to Nettskjema, a survey tool run by the University of Oslo providing a high degree of security and privacy. Organisations and individuals were contacted through email and social media – in the end we only obtained 12 survey responses from Italy and three from Sweden. Because of this, a report of survey results was not completed. The survey did inform the qualitative interviews as some participants were recruited through the surveys – in these cases, participants were asked to elaborate on some survey responses.
The next step of the SODIS project was completing semi-structured qualitative interviews. Interview participants were found in Italy, Hungary, and Sweden, but unfortunately not in Spain. The interview schedule was written in English and translated into Italian, Hungarian, Swedish, and Spanish with the help of research assistants. Four interviews were completed with Italian participants, one in Hungary, and one Sweden. Italian and Swedish interviews were completed by research assistants, while I was present, via telephone. All interviews were transcribed into English and coded using NVivo.
As we were conducting interviews, we realised that the questions of recruitment and enrolment were not as fruitful as originally thought, as the sample number was quite low and not enough detail was provided by participants. What we did realise, however, was that the data gave us quite a lot of qualitative evidence of belief in COVID-19 (and other) conspiracy theories by far-right extremists. Therefore, most of the dissemination of the project results focused rather on this question. Results of SODIS were disseminated at various conferences (ECPR, CPSA, ASEN, EuroCrim) and an invited lecture for the Populism and the Far Right webinar series. The project contributed to a book chapter entitled 'Building a New World Order: COVID-19, the far right, and the pervasiveness of antisemitic conspiracy theories' and to a journal article (in submission), as well as an edited volume completed during the the fellowship period (The Routledge Handbook of Far-Right Extremism in Europe).
