New data release on radical and extremist attitudes in Europe!
DP-R|EX is proud to announce the release of the dataset “Radical and Extremist Attitudes in Europe”, now available at the GESIS Data Archive. The data are available here:
https://doi.org/10.4232/1.14697
Understanding the roots and dynamics of political and religious extremism has become a central challenge for contemporary social science. This cross-national study offers a unique opportunity to analyze how different forms of extremism—left-wing, right-wing, and religious—emerge, interact, and evolve across European societies.
The computer-assisted surveys (CASI) comprise 18,431 interviews from pretests and two main waves conducted in six European countries (Greece, Hungary, . At its core, the study goes beyond conventional approaches by capturing both explicit and implicit extremist attitudes, including those that reject democracy as a political system. With two survey waves conducted across multiple European countries, the data enable robust cross-national and longitudinal comparisons. Representative samples of majority populations are complemented by oversamples of Muslim respondents, allowing for detailed analyses across societal groups that are often underrepresented in survey research.
A key strength of the study lies in its innovative measurement strategy. It includes newly developed and validated scales of political and religious extremism, combined with indirect methods such as an Implicit Association Test (IAT) to address social desirability bias. This makes it possible to study not only what respondents openly report, but also more latent or less socially acceptable attitudes. The data provides rich contextual information, including sociodemographics, political and ideological orientations, religiosity, psychological dispositions, and perceived grievances. This allows researchers to disentangle the shared and distinct drivers of different forms of extremism and to examine their consequences for social cohesion and democratic stability across different institutional settings.
A study description, including information on the covered concepts and groups, can be found in the DP-R|EX data explorer.
