Far-right leadership in comparison: shifts and continuities in German-speaking movements | Dr. Michael C. Zeller

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Abstract

Leadership has long been acknowledged as a crucial feature of social movement activity. Theorisation has delved into the types of leadership and, more recently, the activities performed by leaders. However, comparative research on leadership and detection of any changes over time is scant. Our paper attends to these tasks by looking at the activities of two German-speaking far-right leaders. For many years, Christian Worch was one of the most active and influential neo-Nazi leaders in Germany, communicating much of his activity and strategy in the mid-2000s through a regular circular (Rundbriefe). Similarly, Martin Sellner, both as leader of the Identitarian movement and independent activist, today exercises an outsized role in the German-speaking far-right scene, including through his regular publications in the magazines Compact and Sezession. Our paper uses data of Worch’s and Sellner’s writings, scraped from webpages and gathered from archives, in a mixed-methods comparative design to identify the tasks performed by these leaders, and how frequently. Quantitative text analysis techniques guide the qualitative evaluation of leaders’ activities and reveal shifts – and continuities – in far-right movement leadership. The paper thereby contributes to scholarship on an important aspect of contemporary far-right movements as well as broader social movement literature on the topic of leadership.

Quantitative text analysis corpus

Table 1. Text data descriptive statistics.
Author	Source	Year	No. of Texts	Mean Sentences	Total Sentences	Mean Words	Total Words
Worch	Rundbriefe	2005	54	35.9	1940	640.4	34580
		2006	57	39.2	2235	719.7	41023
		2007	46	47.1	2165	791.4	36406
		2008	36	41.3	1488	737.2	26538
		2009	39	70.7	2757	1286.5	50175
		2010	14	45.9	642	754.9	10569
		2011	9	28.7	258	475.7	4281
		2012	5	63.0	315	1093.8	5469
Sellner	Sezession	2015	15	94.1	1411	3429.0	51435
		2016	12	92.0	1104	3617.8	43413
		2017	14	86.4	1209	3302.6	46237
		2018	10	95.7	957	3639.2	36392
		2019	12	97.1	1165	3931.7	47180
		2020	12	90.0	1079	3728.6	44743
		2021	15	80.7	1211	3430.7	51461
		2022	10	76.0	760	3339.4	33394
	Compact	2016	2	55.0	110	899.0	1798
		2017	7	40.0	280	618.7	4331
		2018	11	34.9	384	588.5	6474
		2019	12	39.4	473	674.5	8094
		2020	13	39.6	515	625.5	8132
		2021	9	41.7	375	677.4	6097

Article figures

Figure 1. Leadership tasks represented in complete corpuses of Worch (left bar) and Sellner (right bar).

Figure 2. Leadership tasks represented in corpuses of Worch and Sellner by year.

Figure A1. Barplot of topic modeling of Worch Rundbriefe text corpus.

Figure A2. Barplot of topic modeling of Sellner Compact and Sezession text corpuses.

Citation

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@article{ZellerVirchow2024,
  title={Far-right leadership in comparison: shifts and continuities in German-speaking movements},
  author={Zeller, Michael C and Noschese, Pasquale},
  journal={Social Movement Studies},
  volume={0},
  number={0},
  pages={1-23},
  year={2024},
  publisher={Sage}
}