Extremism is a notion, which becomes meaningful in democratic and lawful societies. This is sometimes interchangeable with the terms, Fundamentalism and terrorism. It is often said that one who aims to fight against terrorism, must first challenge and overcome extremism. Thus, Analysis of the potentials of extremism in a society is highly articulated. Whereas Fundamentalism intends to bring abo...

Family and Politics: Does Parental Unemployment Cause Right-Wing Extremism? Recent years have witnessed a rise in right-wing extremism among German youth and young adults. This paper investigates the extent to which the experience of parental unemployment during childhood affects young people’s far right-wing attitudes and xenophobia. Estimates from three different German data sets show a posit...

This article argues that the discourses of radicalization and, more lately, of extremism have served to confuse the remit of counter-terrorism. Indeed, it appears that ‘terrorism’, ‘radicalization’ and ‘extremism’ have increasingly become merged into a single discursive framework, one consequence of which has been to blur the important distinction between ‘extremism’ of thought and ‘extremism’ ...

After a short summary of the Sokal Affair and of the point of view of Steven Weinberg, we discuss certain aspects of the scientist ideology present in the last book of Alan Sokal Pseudoscience and Postmodernism: Antagonists or Fellow-Travelers?, published in France. The danger of the three extremisms present in our time relativist extremism, scientist extremism and its mirror-image, the religio...

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous beliefs, and the emergence of majority- or minority-induced extremism is studied, extending our former two-state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural class. At each step they are distributed randomly in different groups within their respective classes to evolve locally by majority rule. In case of a t...

The connection between contradictory public opinions, heterogeneous believes and the emergence of democratic or dictatorial extremism is studied extending our former two state dynamic opinion model. Agents are attached to a social-cultural class. At each step they are distributed randomly in different groups within their respective class to evolve locally by majority rule. In case of a tie the ...

Despite Miller's (1969) now-famous clarion call to "give psychology away" to the general public, scientific psychology has done relatively little to combat festering problems of ideological extremism and both inter- and intragroup conflict. After proposing that ideological extremism is a significant contributor to world conflict and that confirmation bias and several related biases are signific...

Previous research on personality and political attitudes has been conducted in countries where political parties from the center dominate the political system. In the present research (N = 675), we focus on the relationship between the dark side of human personality and political orientation and extremism, respectively, in the course of a presidential election where the two candidates represent...

This study traces the evolution of right-wing extremism, conceptualized as latent electoral support for extreme right-wing parties (i.e., vote intention), in six Western European countries (i.e., Belgium, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, Denmark, and Italy) between 1984 and 1993. Employing a pooled time-series cross-sectional research design, the author examines the relative strength of t...