Research in Political Studies: analyzing parties and politcs in europe.
My research focuses on how political parties and movements behave, communicate and strategize, with a special focus on radical and extreme right groups across Europe.
From “The small Lombard lookout“:
«Do you have good eyesight, boy?».
«Me?» the boy replied. «I see a sparrow a mile away»
«Would you be good to climb to the top of that tree?»
«On top of that tree? I? In half a minute I’ll get on it.»
«And you could tell me what you see up there?»
«For sure!»
«What do you want for this help?»
«What do I want?» the boy said smiling. «Nothing. It’s just a nice thing to do!»
PhD in Political Studies
“A Tale of Two Rights”: Distinguishing European Radical and Extreme Right Parties via Ideology, Political Behavior, and Computational Analysis
What and who are the radical and extreme right in Europe today? This question is dual in nature. First, it questions the conceptual validity of the ubrella term “far right” in capturing the diversity of actors on the right side of the political spectrum. Second, it entails an empirical project aimed at systematically identifying, classifying, and analyzing radical (RRPs) and extreme right parties (ERPs) across the EU member states—a task which, despite growing academic interest, remains underdeveloped in the existing literature.
My PhD project is therefore driven by two central goals. First, to define and distinguish radical and extreme right parties using computational and quantitative methods—particularly Natural Language Processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs), and Social Network Analysis (SNA). Second, to demonstrate that the use of the term “far right” in party-level research is not only conceptually flawed but also methodologically misleading.
The project rests on a core assumption: if radical and extreme right parties are distinct entities, they should differ across multiple dimensions. Their core ideologies should diverge (a claim already supported by earlier qualitative research) and these distinctions should be observable in their party manifestos. Their strategies should also diverge across different institutional and electoral contexts. In addition, different constitutional, legal and electoral provision should have different effects on parties, whether they belong to radical or extreme-right party family. Moreover, their behavior in national parliaments should reflect these differences: for example, RRPs are likely to act differently depending on whether ERPs are present or absent from parliament. Demonstrating variation across these dimensions would support the general hypothesis that RRPs and ERPs constitute analytically distinct categories, thus challenging the utility of the “far right” umbrella term.
Federico Taddei 