Right-Wing Protest and Hate Crimes

Author: Sulin Sardoschau (Humboldt University Berlin, RFBerlin and IZA)Annalí Casanueva-Artís (ifo)
Posted: 16 March 2026

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of right-wing populist mobilization on anti-minority violence across 10,000 German municipalities between 2015 and 2019. Exploiting variation in weather conditions on scheduled protest days, we show that right-wing protests held on pleasant days increase their salience and visibility by attracting larger crowds, generating more attention in traditional and social media and subsequently raising the probability of hate crimes by 8.6 percentage points. These offenses are carried out predominantly by known, recidivist, lone-actor extremists in the aftermath of the protest. Spillovers are substantial: downstream newspaper coverage of protests and social media networks transmit violence to municipalities that did not host any protest. Our findings highlight a critical externality of grass-roots populist movements: they not only drive immediate local violence but also propagate it across wider networks.
JEL codes: D74, D72, K42, J15, L82
Keywords: Populism, hate crimes, protest, media