Books

Downplaying Extremism? How the State Approaches Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremist Threats

Cambridge University Press (Elements in European Politics), 2026. Available Open Access. 

The rise of political extremism is often attributed to citizens' economic and cultural grievances. Less is known about how the state itself may facilitate extremism in contemporary democracies, despite frequent claims that elected leaders fail to contain it. How valid is this critique? Analyzing thousands of documents on the behavior of political parties, intelligence agencies, and the police in Germany across decades and states, the authors show that blind spots in combating extremism are widespread and deeply partisan. In parliamentary debates and election manifestos, right-wing parties devote less attention to right-wing extremist crimes than their prevalence warrants, while left-wing parties often downplay left-wing extremism. Similar divisions appear within ostensibly neutral intelligence agencies and the police. Across institutions, partisanship and ideology shape how state actors address extremist threats, raising concerns about the state's capacity to safeguard public safety and democracy.

Dilemmas of Inclusion: Muslims in European Politics 

Princeton University Press, 2017

Read the Introduction

Dilemmas of Inclusion book cover

The entire book is also available on JStor (subscriptions might vary)

  • Winner of the 2018 Stein Rokkan Prize for Comparative Social Science Research presented by the International Science Council (ISC), the University of Bergen and the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR).
  • Winner of the 2019 Luebbert Award, given out by the American Political Science Assoication for the best book in Comparative Politics published in the previous two years.

As Europe’s Muslim communities continue to grow, so does their impact on electoral politics and the potential for inclusion dilemmas. In vote-rich enclaves, Muslim views on religion, tradition, and gender roles can deviate sharply from those of the majority electorate, generating severe trade-offs for parties seeking to broaden their coalitions. Dilemmas of Inclusion explains when and why European political parties include Muslim candidates and voters, revealing that the ways in which parties recruit this new electorate can have lasting consequences.

Drawing on original evidence from thousands of electoral contests in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and Great Britain, Dilemmas sheds new light on when minority recruitment will match up with existing party positions and uphold electoral alignments and when it will undermine party brands and shake up party systems. The book demonstrates that when parties are seduced by the quick delivery of ethno-religious bloc votes, they undercut their ideological coherence, fail to establish programmatic linkages with Muslim voters, and miss their opportunity to build cross-ethnic, class-based coalitions. Dilemmas highlights how the politics of minority inclusion can become a testing ground for parties, showing just how far their commitments to equality and diversity will take them when push comes to electoral shove.

Providing a unified theoretical framework for understanding the causes and consequences of minority political incorporation, and especially as these pertain to European Muslim populations, Dilemmas of Inclusion advances our knowledge about how ethnic and religious diversity reshapes domestic politics in today’s democracies.

Immigration and Conflict in Europe

Cambridge University Press (Studies in Comparative Politics), 2010

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  • 2011 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Contemporary debates give the impression that the presence of immigrants necessarily spells strife. Yet as Immigration and Conflict in Europe shows, the incidence of conflict involving immigrants and their descendants has varied widely across groups, cities, and countries. The book presents a theory to account for this uneven pattern, explaining why we observe clashes between immigrants and natives in some locations but not in others and why some cities experience confrontations between immigrants and state actors while others are spared from such conflicts. The book addresses how economic conditions interact with electoral incentives to account for immigrant-native and immigrant-state conflict across groups and cities within Great Britain as well as across Germany and France. I highlight the importance of national immigration regimes and local political economies in shaping immigrants' economic position and political behavior, demonstrating how economic and electoral forces, rather than cultural differences, determine patterns of conflict and calm.