Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment

Know about the book -

Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment is written by Michael A. Hansen and published by Springer Nature. It's available with International Standard Book Number or ISBN identification 3031508904 (ISBN 10) and 9783031508905 (ISBN 13).

This book traces the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from its inception in 2013 to its re-election to the Bundestag in 2021, emphasising the party’s nature as a “populist issue entrepreneur” and covering the three major crises that have shaken European party politics – the Eurozone crisis, the so-called refugee crisis and the COVID pandemic. Currently, books on the AfD are largely limited to historical accounts and surface-level analyses of the party. This volume is both empirically rigorous and conceptually nuanced: it seeks to understand the party’s political trajectory and its appeal to its supporters by using advanced quantitative methodologies to analyse voter behaviour, as well as by interpreting the party’s communication strategies through mixed empirical methods. It embeds this account within a well-grounded theoretical argument. The argument emphasises three important explanatory conditions – a favourable political opportunity structure, issue entrepreneurship, and the party’s stages of political development.