Far-Right Mobilization and the European Crises : Electoral and Protest politics

Project Information

FARMEC

Grant agreement ID: 883620

DOI

10.3030/883620

Project closed

EC signature date 20 April 2020

Start date 1 May 2021

End date 31 December 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 184 707,84

EU contribution

€ 184 707,84

Coordinated by

FONDATION NATIONALE DES SCIENCES POLITIQUES
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FARMEC (Far-Right Mobilization and the European Crises : Electoral and Protest politics)

Reporting period: 2021-05-01 to 2023-04-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The FARMEC project investigates the drivers, dynamics, and consequences of far-right protest mobilization in Europe. It asks whether such mobilization is mainly a response to short-term crises or reflects deeper, long-term societal changes.
To address this, the project focused on three key goals:
1. Developing a comprehensive framework to understand far-right activity across elections and protests, combining insights from political science and sociology.
2. Exploring the empirical connections between electoral and protest mobilization to understand how far-right parties and movements collaborate across different arenas of political conflict.
3. Providing tools and data for societal understanding, enabling policymakers, educators, and civil society actors to engage with the implications of far-right mobilization.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

To achieve these goals, I collected data on several thousand episodes in Europe over the period 2008 to 2021, using tools like protest event analysis and social network analysis to map far-right groups’ tactics, claims, and networks.
Specifically, there are two main datasets that have been collected as part of this project:
[1] The first dataset consists of protest event data extrapolated from (a) national quality newspaper archives and (b) far-right actors’ official websites. This data pertains to the mobilization of selected far-right collective actors (the most active far-right movement parties in the country), and covers 11 years (2008-2018) and 11 European countries (Austria, Bulgaria, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Poland, Slovakia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom). The dataset allows us to quantify the extent and characteristics of protest mobilization by selected far-right collective actors comparatively across Europe.
[2] The second dataset expands the scope geographically and longitudinally, while also covering all protest events taking place rather than focusing on selected actors. It consists of protest event data extrapolated from national quality newspaper archives, over the period 2008-2021 in 12 European countries (Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, The Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden). The dataset allows us to explore the initiators and nature of these protests and map the main issues addressed in far-right street campaigns in Europe.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project paved the way to building the Far-Right Protest Observatory (www.farpo.eu) an interactive platform allowing to track and compare far-right protest activity across Europe, visualize overtime and cross-national trends, and download the project data and output. Developed in collaboration with researchers at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Sciences Po, and the University of Bologna, this tool provides vital data and insights for researchers, policymakers, and civil society organizations.

Homepage of the Far-Right Protest Observatory - FARPO