Political Entrepreneurship in the Age of Dealignment

This book traces the rise of the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) from its inception in 2013 to its re-election to the Bundestag in 2021, emphasising the party's nature as a "populist issue entrepreneur" and covering the three major crises that have shaken European party politics - the Eurozone crisis, the so-called refugee crisis and the COVID pandemic. Currently, books on the AfD are largely limited to historical accounts and surface-level analyses of the party. This volume is both empirically rigorous and conceptually nuanced: it seeks to understand the party's political trajectory and its appeal to its supporters by using advanced quantitative methodologies to analyse voter behaviour, as well as by interpreting the party's communication strategies through mixed empirical methods. It embeds this account within a well-grounded theoretical argument. The argument emphasises three important explanatory conditions - a favourable political opportunity structure, issue entrepreneurship, and the party's stages of political development.

Chapter 1: Introduction. - Chapter 2: Far Right Failure: Parties of the Far Right in Germany, 1945-2023. - Chapter 3: A Theory of Populist Far Right Issue Entrepreneurship in an Age of Dealignment. - Chapter 4: Emergence: The AfD and the European Debt Crisis in in the 2013 Federal Election. - Chapter 5: Breakthrough: The Refugee Crisis, Anti-Immigrant Sentiment, and the Success of the AfD in the 2017 Federal Election. - Chapter 6: Sustainment: The AfD and the COVID-19 Pandemic in the 2021 Federal Election. - Chapter 7: Strategies for Sustaining Success: Ideological Positioning and Fashioning a Party Brand. - Chapter 8: Sustaining Success Beyond the Core: Campaign Posters and the Professionalization of the AfD. - Chapter 9: Conclusion: Issue Entrepreneurship and the Future of the AfD.