Political behaviour of Democratic Politicians and Politicians of Right-Wing Extremist local lists in Local Councils – Self-perception and perception of others

This study empirically bases on 34 interviews in seven local councils in which a right-wing extremist local list had won seats. Those lists are a type of local lists which in turn are defined as “groups participating in local elections and being not political parties in the sense of the German party law” (Göhlert et al. 2008). Further right-wing extremist local lists are in some extent "hidden lists" (see Reiser 2011) because they are on the one hand founded close to right-wing extremist parties like the 'National Democratic Party of Germany' (NPD) and share on the other hand right-wing extremist contents (Krappidel 2011). Therefore, this study sets out to examine how democratic politicians behave towards those right-wing extremist politicians and how right-wing extremist politicians behave towards democratic politicians. Both types of politicians were asked how they realized their own behavior (self-perception) and the behavior of the other type of politicians (perception of the others). According to personality psychology resp. the investigations about the "Big Five" (McCrae/Costa 1987, Goldberg 1989) this study wants to find out which political behavior patterns resp. political behavioral dimensions are central in those local settings. According to the semantic differential by Osgood et al. 1957 which was expanded as the polarity-profile method by Hofstätter (1963) the interviews where analyzed with regard to behavioral situations. These perceived behavioral patterns were in turn attributed to behavioral pairs of opposite. The goal is to develop a political behavior profile for each research local council.