Dynamics of far-right mobilization and opinion change in contemporary democracies (IMPACT)

The project

This project seeks to provide evidence-based knowledge about the impact of far-right protests on ordinary citizens’ attitudes.

It is funded for a period of 3 years (January 2026 - December 2028) by Sciences Po as part of the projects selected by the Scientific Advisory Board.

Project Objectives

Although far-right collective actors are engaging more frequently in protests, and their street actions are becoming more visible and widely attended, we still do not know whether far-right protest mobilisation matters to society, or to what extent. Does street activism help to entrench far-right campaigns and actors in society? Do far-right protests contribute to ideological divides among citizens?

IMPACT employs a multi-method, comparative approach combining protest event analysis, text-as-data methods and survey experiments. This provides comprehensive insights into the political impact of far-right protests on citizens' views in 12 countries between 2008 and 2024. The analysis examines both EU and non-EU members in Eastern and Western Europe, which are characterised by diverse institutional frameworks.

IMPACT is organised into two work packages:

• WP1: Mapping far-right protests in Europe through large language models (LLMs). WP1 will produce a new dataset of protest events, enabling qualitative and quantitative mapping of far-right mobilisation.
• WP2: Far-right protests and citizens' attitudes
  WP2 will combine large-scale, multinational survey data from the HUMAN Surveys Project with protest event-level data from the database in WP1, enabling comparison between respondents interviewed just before and after such events.
  A survey experiment will investigate the causal impact of the issue focus, tactics, and media coverage of protest events on perceptions of far-right protests.

Team

• Caterina Froio, Associate Professor, Sciences Po, CEE (Principal Investigator)
• Pietro Castelli Gattinara, Associate Professor, ULB, CEVIPOL 
• Timothée Dennebouy, Research Intern, Sciences Po, CEE (January 2026)
• Giuliano Formisano, Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Zurich 
• Inken Hermann, Phd student, ULB, CEVIPOL 
• Laura Herzl, Research Assistant, University of Zurich