Focusing on Muslim populations in five Muslim-majority countries and four Western European countries, we examine the correlates of popular support for terrorist violence. In both samples, support for terrorism is stronger among those who see democracy as a Western political system which is not suitable for Muslim societies. Perceived Western economic dominance is related to more support for terrorism among Muslims in Western Europe. In the Muslim countries, blaming the West for negative international relations is associated with greater support for terrorism. The associations found are remarkably similar across the Western European countries but vary considerably across the Muslim countries, preventing generalized interpretations. Nevertheless, our findings indicate that perceptions about world politics represent an important factor of pro-terrorist views among Muslims. Therefore, we suggest that improvement of the relationships between the West and the Muslim world can reduce support for terrorism.

In the present study I use large-scale survey data to compare radical right voting to other forms of electoral behavior in Western Europe. The chosen method, multilevel multinomial logistic regression, allows, first, distinguishing among voting for several party families as well as abstention and, second, controlling for differences between countries and survey rounds. I find that the radical right electorate is not characterized by social alienation or anti-modern values; these characteristics are more likely to be encountered among people who abstain from elections. Radical right voting is most strongly motivated by political attitudes, namely by negative perception of immigration, political mistrust, opposition to income redistribution, and – rather unexpectedly – political satisfaction. My analysis also shows that radical right parties in different West European countries attract voters with similar ideological orientations which remain relatively stable over time. In the conclusion I discuss the implications of my findings for comparative research on the radical right party family.

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With the discovery of gamma ray bursts1,2, it became clear that our Universe flickers with superfast catastrophic events, sometimes lasting for a thousandths of a second. These ultra-fast transients - the peculiar one-day butterflies of the Universe - shine so brightly that they are noticed even on the other end of the Universe and, moreover, by very small telescopes. But in the radio range, the sky remained silent until the beginning of the 21st century. Only in 2007, radio astronomers analyzing archival observations of the Parkes Radio Telescope first encountered fast transients 3,4 . About a hundred such sources have already been discovered. We report the first optical observation of the closest radio burster FRB 180916.J0158+655-8 synchronously with a radio burst. In total, we obtained about 155,093 images at MASTER Global Robotic Net9*. In the course of our observations, we found a new method for detecting objects deep below the noise level. In addition, using the new method, we found the excess of photons in the FRB direction at a level of 23 m associated with the emission of the host galaxy.

Conjoint experiments are quickly gaining popularity as a vehicle for studying multidimensional political preferences. A common way to explore heterogeneity of preferences estimated with conjoint experiments is by estimating average marginal component effects across subgroups. However, this method does not give the researcher the full access to the variation of preferences in the studied populations, as that would require estimating effects on the individual level. Currently, there is no accepted technique to obtain estimates of individual-level preferences from conjoint experiments. The present paper addresses this gap by proposing a procedure to estimate individual preferences as respondent-specific marginal component effects. The proposed strategy does not require any additional assumptions compared to the standard conjoint analysis, although some changes to the task design are recommended. Methods to account for uncertainty in resulting estimates are also discussed. Using the proposed procedure, I partially replicate a conjoint experiment on immigrant admission with recommended design adjustments. Then, I demonstrate how individual marginal component effects can be used to explore distributions of preferences, intercorrelations between different preference dimensions, and relationships of preferences to other variables of interest.