CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Márton Végh |
|---|---|
| Title | Sympathy for the Devil? Right-wing terrorism and political behavior in Hungary |
| Summary | Despite the growing right-wing terrorist threat in Europe, the effects of extremeright violence on political behavior remain understudied. Especially little is known about the impact of extremist terrorism or hate crime against minorities on the electoral performance of mostly non-violent radical right parties with a similar ideological outlook. This paper contributes to the literature by examining the electoral effect of the 2008-2009 terrorist attacks against Roma minority members in Hungary, the most significant case of domestic ethnic violence since WWII. The attacks preceded the rise of the radical right Jobbik party to national prominence in the European and national parliamentary elections of 2009 and 2010, where it ran on an explicitly anti-Roma platform. I utilize the spatial variation in targeted localities to estimate the effect of exposure to terrorism – proxied by geographical closeness – at the locality level compared to the 2006 elections. While previous research often failed to consider that electoral outcomes are endogenous to target selection, to identify more valid causal effects, I utilize a natural experiment in which the control group contains localities where perpetrators planned further attacks prior to their arrest. Difference-in-differences regression models with varying specifications and robustness checks demonstrate that the exposure to the attacks has on average increased support for Jobbik with approximately 3-5 percentage points by 2009. There is some evidence that this was accompanied by an increase in anti-Roma prejudice at the individual level, implying that the political change was mediated by shifting attitudes towards the outgroup in response to social identity threat. |
| Supervisor | Simonovits, Gábor |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/vegh_marton.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University