The last decade has seen a notable increase in support for far right parties and an alarming rise of right-wing extremism across Europe. Drawing on a new comparative youth survey in 14 European countries, this article provides deeper insight into young people's support for nationalist and far right ideology: negative attitudes towards minorities, xenophobia, welfare chauvinism and exclusionism in relation to migrants. We first map the support for far right ideology among youth in Europe, and then use multilevel regression analysis (16,935 individuals nested in 30 locations) to investigate which individual or contextual factors are associated with a higher propensity among young people towards getting involved in far right movements.

This paper explores how unequal resources and social and economic polarization affects the size of social networks and their use to access resources. We argue that individual resource position generates divergent expectations with regard to the impact of polarization on the size of networks on one hand, and their usefulness for accessing resources on the other. Social and economic polarization encourages reliance on informal networks, but those at the bottom of the social structure are forced to rely on more extensive networks than the wealthy to compensate for their isolated and underprivileged position. At the same time, social and economic polarization limits the resources the poor can access through their networks. We provide evidence consistent with these propositions, based on data derived from the International Social Survey Programme 2001 "Social Networks" dataset combined with contextual information on the levels of economic inequality in particular countries along with whether they experienced postcommunism.

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This chapter describes the research design applied in the research project The Emigrant Communities of Latvia: National Identity, Transnational Relations and Diaspora Politics, which forms the empirical core of this volume. It discusses this methodology in the context of other migration studies and major surveys on migration. Compared to previous studies The Emigrant Communities of Latvia is the most inclusive in terms of the target audience. All Latvians and Latvian nationals abroad were invited to participate in the survey, applying a broad and open definition of ‘Latvian diaspora’ based on personal identification with the Latvian nation and/or citizenship. Being Web-based, the survey did not impose any limitations as to geographic location, aiming at all countries in the world. Combining a wide range of respondent recruitment channels and techniques and supported by a media campaign, the survey reached 14,068 respondents in 118 countries. Innovative solutions were used to increase response rates and to decrease attrition. Several research topics in this study required separate qualitative research approaches. Thus, 159 partly-structured in-depth interviews were also conducted in countries where the Latvian diaspora is largest, as well as in-depth interviews with return migrants and diaspora policy experts. The new methodology has far-reaching potential to be applied to the study of other migrant groups in Europe and beyond. Importantly, The Emigrant Communities of Latvia project has tested and empirically proven the potential of Web surveys in collecting the opinions of large populations of migrants in many countries.

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