Extreme right-wing voting in Germany in a multilevel perspective: A rejoinder to Lubbers and Scheepers

Abstract.  In their article about individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s, Lubbers and Scheepers ('Individual and contextual characteristics of the German extreme right-wing vote in the 1990s: A test of complementary theories', European Journal of Political Research 38 (2000): 63–94) found a contra- intuitive significant negative relationship between unemployment rate and an individual's likelihood of voting for the right-wing extremist Republikaner Party. The purpose of this article is to shed light on the reasons for this puzzling result. To capture contextual information resembling the individual's life sphere as close as possible, we use data that allow us to include the districts as an additional level between the individual and the state in our multilevel analyses.