Eric Peter Kaufmann

Birkbeck, University of London · Department of Politics

The rise of the populist right in the West is emerging as the most discussed manifestation of nationalism in the world today. In this paper, I argue that this ‘new nationalism’ is largely driven by immigration, which affects ethnic majorities within nation‐states. This in turn alters the ethnic character of the nation, challenging what I term the e...

Ideal types have received less attention than membership criteria in the ethnicity and nationalism literature. This article uses crowdsourced genealogical data and onomastics software to show that British Isles surnames and ancestry remain overrepresented among American actors, especially in roles connected with the national narrative. Conformity t...

The purpose of the Exchange feature is to publish discussions that engage, advance and initiate new debates in the study of nations and nationalism. This Exchange article is on the subject of 'Populism and Nationalism'. Each contributor addresses the following four questions on the subject: (1) What is populism and what role does it play within the...

Does ethnic diversity increase or reduce white threat perceptions? Meta-analyses help orient a field and communicate findings to policymakers. We report the results of a meta-analysis of studies measuring the relationship between ethnic context and both opposition to immigration and support for anti-immigration parties. Our analysis attempts to be...

Britain’s vote to leave the European Union highlights the importance of White majority opposition to immigration. This article presents the results of a survey experiment examining whether priming an open form of ethno-nationalism based on immigrant assimilation reduces hostility to immigration and support for right-wing populism in Britain. Result...

Will the rising share of ethnic minorities in western societies spark a backlash or lead to greater acceptance of diversity? This paper examines this question through the prism of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), the most successful populist right party in British history. The paper contributes to work on contextual effects by arguing that ethnic...

Human dynamics and sociophysics suggest statistical models that may explain and provide us with better insight into social phenomena. Contextual and selection effects tend to produce extreme values in the tails of rank-ordered distributions of both census data and district-level election outcomes. Models that account for this nonlinearity generally...

The general perception is the group known as the 'Left Behinds' exerted a dreadful retribution on the power elite by voting for Brexit and for Donald Trump. Not so, says Eric Kaufmann, there were other reasons The shockwaves from Brexit and Trump had barely finished rippling through leading media outlets before pundits were pronouncing this a prote...

Classic theories of nationalism, whether modernist or ethnosymbolist, emphasise the role of elites and spread of a common imagined community from centre to periphery. Recent work across a range of disciplines challenges this account by stressing the role of horizontal, peer-to-peer, dynamics alongside top-down flows. Complexity theory, which has re...

Nation and diversity are often casted in oppositional terms. The present joint-intervention explores the limits and possibilities of what we call 'inclusive nation', i.e. a nation which embraces rather than expunging diversity. To reflect on this idea, the Loughborough University Nationalism Network (LUNN) organized a symposium, bringing together b...

See http://www.sneps.net/research-interests/whiteworkingclass for my conference papers, articles, presentations, blog posts and media coverage

Does the local presence of immigrant groups increase White hostility to immigration? Most research finds that diverse neighborhoods reduce White opposition to minorities and immigration. However, most studies at higher geographies find the reverse effect. We confirm this pattern for England and Wales for 2009-2012. Yet, contextual studies are open...

This article presents the first projection, to our knowledge, of the intensity of religiosity in a population, which has a strong bearing on the critical question of the religious future of Europe. Spain has, in recent decades, simultaneously experienced rapid religious decline and marked demographic change through high immigration and declining fe...

It is often forgotten that, regardless of time or place, periods of high immigration are almost always periods of high anti-immigration sentiment. When ethnic change is rapid, driven by immigration or differences in ethnic natural increase, the ethnic majority often responds with a politics of immigration. This was true, for instance, in Britain in...

Ethnic fractionalization (EF) is frequently used as an explanatory tool in models of economic development, civil war and public goods provision. However, if EF is endogenous to political and economic change, its utility for further research diminishes. This turns out not to be the case. This paper provides the first comprehensive model of EF as a d...

Innovative psychology experiments and network models have radically undermined the once-popular ‘rational actor’ model of human behaviour. Can this new research improve the study of politics and the policies of academic departments, too?Eric Kaufmann examines the possibilities.

Contemporary Majority Nationalism - Contemporary Majority Nationalism, Alain-G.Gagnon, AndréLecours and GenevièveNootens, eds., Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2011, pp. 248. - Volume 45 Issue 3 - Eric Kaufmann

This article adopts categories from nationalism theory to classify theories of religion. Primordialist explanations are grounded in evolutionary psychology and emphasize the innate human demand for religion. Primordialists predict that religion does not decline in the modern era but will endure in perpetuity. Constructionist theories argue that rel...

Book synopsis: The field of political demography—the politics of population change—is dramatically underrepresented in political science. At a time when demographic changes—aging in the rich world, youth bulges in the developing world, ethnic and religious shifts, migration, and urbanization—are waxing as never before, this neglect is especially gl...

The steady drip of dissident Republican attacks forms the backdrop to this special issue of Political Quarterly. Moreover, this comes at a time of economic austerity, when Northern Ireland faces unprecedented cuts to its public sector-dominated economy. The economic crisis in the South adds an additional layer of uncertainty to the picture. In the...

Much of the current debate over secularization in Europe focuses only on the direction of religious change and pays exclusive attention to social causes. Scholars have been less attentive to shifts in the rate of religious decline and to the role of demography—notably fertility and immigration. This article addresses both phenomena. It uses data fr...

Book synopsis: The book analyses the study of the growing field of ethnicity and politics from a number of different angles. These include the nature of the subject itself, different theoretical approaches, ways of addressing political issues the relationship gives rise to, the impact of major global challenges and a survey of output in the field....

Much of the current debate over secularization in Europe focuses only on the direction of religious change and pays exclusive attention to social causes. Scholars have been less attentive to shifts in the rate of religious decline and to the role of demography—notably fertility and immigration. This article addresses both phenomena. It uses data fr...

Much of the current debate over secularization in Europe focuses only on the direction of religious change and pays exclusive attention to social causes. Scholars have been less attentive to shifts in the rate of religious decline and to the role of demography—notably fertility and immigration. This article addresses both phenomena. It uses data fr...

Mitt Romney has emerged from a bruising primary as the only serious Republican presidential candidate. The small field of Republican hopefuls also included fellow-Mormon Jon Huntsman. Is this a coincidence?

Review of "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson

Review of "The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline in Violence in History and Its Causes", by Steven Pinker

Population change is reversing secularism and shifting the center of gravity of entire societies in a conservative religious direction.

Looking at Major League Baseball and the Premier League, Eric Kaufmann suggests that sports statistics could have surprising lessons for students of politics. From Major League Baseball to the English Premiership, the field of sports statistics has blossomed over the last decade. Drawing analogies from the sporting world, Eric Kaufmann argues that...

The recent rise in identification with American political parties has focused interest on the long-term dynamics of party support. Liberal commentators cite immigration and youth as forces that will produce a natural advantage for the Democrats in the future, while conservative writers highlight the importance of high fertility amongst Republicans...

Recent large-N quantitative studies have failed to uncover a link between demographic change and conflict. This seems to refute quite powerful qualitative evidence from small-scale case studies that such a relationship exists. This article attempts to reconcile the conflicting evidence by revealing how population change—in this case a major decline...

This collection of articles on Swiss national identity is impressive on several counts. First, it gathers together the finest scholars of Swiss nationalism of the new generation: a cohort steeped in the lexicon of theories of nationalism and multiculturalism. Second, it displays impressive rigour: the pieces are so analytical and restrained that on...

This paper presents a new dataset which codes for the approximate founding date of the largest ethnic group in the world's states as well as the wave of state creation in which the particular country emerged. All contemporary questions of nationalism and ethnic conflict begin with the imperfect overlap between ethnic/national communities and politi...

Review of ‘American Grace’, by Robert Putnam and David Campbell.

Perhaps Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have won the argument for secularism with the majority of the West. But the facts point in the other direction: what no one has noticed is that far from declining, religious populations are actually multiplying. This extraordinary demographic phenomenon indicates that the more religious people are, t...

A lively debate in the comparative ethnic conflict literature pits those who argue that ethnic fractionalization is linked to civil conflict against those, most famously Fearon and Laitin (2003), who claim that ethnic diversity is not associated with violent civil conflict. The latter perspective is a staple of the mainstream instrumentalist school...

This chapter tests the thesis that the population of the developed world will become increasingly religious in the twenty-first century, reversing decades of secularisation. There will be no mass conversions or sudden shifts in the cultural mood. Instead, religiosity will spread largely through demographic advantage. This study explores the relatio...

We project the religious composition of the United States to 2043, considering fertility differences, migration, intergenerational religious transmission and conversion by 11 ethnoreligious groups. If fertility and migration trends continue, Hispanic Catholics will experience rapid growth, expanding from 10 to 18 percent of the population between 2...

A fast-growing Muslim population is a threat to European values, according to the “Eurabianists.” But a culture war in which fundamentalists of all faiths fight secularism is a more worrying trend.

With all the current talk about the revival of religion, political Scientist Eric Kaufmann takes a look at the statistics and muses that if demography is any guide, the world over the next half century will become much more religious and much more conservative.

Eric Kaufmann’s seminar at ICSR gave a brief introduction to the key issues raised in his new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile Books, 2010), which provides a counter argument to theories that posit the decline of religion and the subsequent rise of liberal secularism. The book focuses on trends in religious demography. Mr Kaufm...

Book review: 'Tyranny of Guilt', by Pascal Bruckner. Guilt, stirred up by leftist thinkers, is now de rigueur in the west. But Pascal Bruckner believes our soul-searching is both hypocritical and injurious

The Orange Order could widen its appeal by embracing the liberal ideals of the monarch who inspired it. But it will be a hard road to walk.

Pope Benedict's recent visit to Britain has been just as controversial as John Paul II's tour of 1982. But the 180-degree shift in the axis of conflict reveals how British society has changed over the past 28 years.

Book synopsis: Irish immigrants and their descendants have made a vital contribution to the creation of modern Scotland. This book is the first collection of essays on the Irish in Scotland for almost twenty years, and brings together for the first time all the leading authorities on the subject. It provides a major reassessment of the Irish immigr...

Religion is once again one of the most urgent fields of human experience. Now an important new book has startling things to tell us about its future.

Samuel Huntington died a pariah among America's intellectual elite. It's because he was normal.

As minority groups swell in numbers, the country's political makeup is destined for a shift, too.

Book synopsis: Although nationalism and ethnicity have long been associated with minority populations, an emerging literature looks at how the state and/or a majority group interact with minorities, and how, behind the expression of the nation promoted by the state, there is often an ethnic core. This book contributes to this emerging literature on...

This article argues that the world is in the midst of a long-term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority domination was common in premodern societies, modernity (with its accent on democracy and popular sovereignty) has engendered a shift to dominant majority ethnicity. The article begins with conceptual...

This paper tries to make the case for a model of political identity based on an optical metaphor, which is especially applicable to nations. Human vision can be separated into sentient object, lenses and inbuilt mental ideas. This corresponds well to identity processes in which ‘light’ from a bounded territorial referent is refracted through variou...

We project the religious composition of the United States to 2043, considering fertility differences, migration, intergenerational religious transmission and conversion by 11 ethnoreligious groups. If fertility and migration trends continue, Hispanic Catholics will experience rapid growth, expanding from 10 to 18 percent of the population between 2...

Sociologists of religion often overlook the role of demography. An exception to this rule is found in the work of Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, who link religious decline to human development and the demographic transition. However, their individual-level thesis is based on bivariate trends, with multivariate analysis limited to the aggregate...

Two new studies of empire and nationalism should make us think again about conflating xenophobia, nationalism and aggression.

Book synopsis: This is the first book which is based on unprecedented access to the archives of both the Ulster Unionist Party and the Orange Order. The history depicted in this book is of two organisations which even at the apogee of their powers in the 1950s were riven with major stresses and conflicts. It shows just how precarious the position o...

Based on unprecedented access to the Order's internal documents, this book provides the first systematic social history of the Orange Order - the Protestant association dedicated to maintaining the British connection in Northern Ireland. Kaufmann charts the Order's path from the peak of its influence, in the early 1960s, to its present-day crisis....

Religious beliefs held by non-attenders are not a lightly-held relic of the past, but a powerful predictor of social behaviour and attitudes. For instance, even with controls, religious people are significantly more likely to place themselves on the 'conservative' end of the 'liberal-conservative' ideological spectrum; those who identify as 'conser...

What are the political implications of differences in growth rates between secular and religious populations in western Europe? Dr Kaufmann’s paper claims that demographic factors can lead to a reversal of the secularisation process and to growing religiosity in society even if religious apostates outnumber converts. The secular population of west...

From introduction: On October 18-19, 2007, the Tallinn Conference on Conceptualising Integration was held that focused on the Estonian integration policy. While being in the middle of composing the new state programme for the years 2008-2013 at the time of the conference, I’m glad that the conference gave us an opportunity to share our ideas with o...

Nowhere in the world – not even in Northern Ireland – was Orangeism more popular than it was in Canada. When the Orange Order reached its peak in the 1920s, 60 per cent of the world’s Orangemen lived in Canada and Newfoundland. Toronto was so Orange in complexion that it was known as ‘the Belfast of the North America’. This collection of essays pla...

This article uses data from the European Values Surveys and European Social Survey for the period 1981-2004 to establish basic trends in religious attendance and belief across the ten countries that have been consistently surveyed. These show that secularization is mainly occurring in Catholic European countries and has effectively ceased among pos...

A leading US Christian says that faith in Europe will be re-energised by a creative Christian minority and by the example of Islam. But he is too sanguine about the integration of Muslims and about "model" America - where religiosity is, in part, a function of white ethnic anxiety.

A leading US Christian says that faith in Europe will be re-energised by a creative Christian minority and by the example of Islam. But he is too sanguine about the integration of Muslims and about "model" America - where religiosity is, in part, a function of white ethnic anxiety.

What are the political implications of differences in growth rates between secular and religious populations in western Europe? Dr Kaufmann’s paper claims that demographic factors can lead to a reversal of the secularisation process and to growing religiosity in society even if religious apostates outnumber converts. The secular population of weste...

Like other voluntary associations, fraternities such as the Orange Order underpin political cleavages. The membership dynamics behind such associations are less clear. Rival theories attribute membership fluctuations alternatively to changes in social capital, economic structure, culture, or events. This article uses a pooled time-series cross-sect...

Party organisations are often ‘black boxes’ overlooked by scholars in favour of party leaders, manifestos and elections. Yet intra-party dynamics are often crucial. This article uses the example of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) to illustrate this. Events in the 1998–2003 period highlight the importance of splits within the party's governing Ulste...

In Europe, the fertility advantage of the religious over non-believers has historically been counterbalanced by the march of secularisation. Not any more. Secularisation in Europe has reached saturation point, and Islam continues to grow. We will soon enter a new age of religious resurgence

Live discussion about the end of secularisation in Europe.