Christopher Wendt

I am a PhD candidate specializing in comparative politics. My research interests include elections, parties and party systems and ethnic politics, particularly West European voting behavior and the politics of immigration.

My dissertation explores how small, programmatically-focused (“niche”) parties increase their support in previously stable party systems. I argue that niche parties grow through the rapid re-weighting of issue priorities or social identities generated by unanticipated (but measurable), high impact events. By unsettling individual expectations about their environment, these “shocks” increase the salience of a related dimension of contestation. A niche party grows when 1) the salience of the dimension it emphasizes increases and 2) the distribution of voter preferences gives the party a comparative advantage on the relevant dimension. My dissertation specifically examines the rapid growth of West European anti-immigrant, or “Nativist,” parties in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The evidence comes from 22 months of research in Germany and Austria, including an analysis of four regional newspapers (1960-2005), 185 elite interviews (50 with Nativist elites), observations of Nativist rallies and meetings, and an analysis of Nativist party literature. A dataset on Nativist support in West European elections (1973-2006) builds on existing work through the addition of new variables, while original datasets were constructed at the state and local levels for Germany and Austria. My research has been supported by the Fulbright program, the German Marshall Fund, the Harvard Center for European Studies and the MIT Center for International Studies.

My broader research agenda focuses on party competition and the impact of ethnicity on democratic politics, particularly the dynamics between natives and immigrants in advanced industrial countries. A future project will explore how recent immigrants form issue priorities, and why they channel those priorities into different forms of political participation.

Dissertation Summary (pdf)