Radical and Extremist Attitudes in Europe

This comparative cross-national study examines political and religious radicalism and extremism in Europe. It enables systematic comparisons of left-wing, right-wing, and religious forms of extremism as well as religious fundamentalism, and investigates how these phenomena overlap, diverge, and potentially reinforce each other. The study aims to conceptualize, measure, and explain both explicit and implicit extremist attitudes that reject democracy as a political system rather than merely opposing specific liberal-democratic norms. The data allow analyses of the social roots, consequences, and interrelations of different forms of political and religious radicalism across European societies. The data comprise two survey waves and accompanying pretests conducted in European countries and the United States. The surveys include representative samples of native populations alongside oversamples of Muslim respondents. The first wave covered Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain, while the second expanded the design to Germany, France, Hungary, and Greece, enabling cross-national analyses of radicalism, social tensions, and perceptions of extremism. A key feature of the data is the inclusion of newly developed and validated attitudinal scales measuring left-wing radicalism, right-wing radicalism, and general anti-democratic extremist attitudes. To address social desirability bias in extremism research, the surveys combine direct survey items with indirect and implicit measurement approaches, including an Implicit Association Test (IAT) module implemented in selected samples. This design enables analyses of both consciously expressed and implicit extremist attitudes. In addition, the data includes a wide range of explanatory variables, such as sociodemographic characteristics, political attitudes, ideological orientations, religiosity, psychological dispositions, and perceived social and political grievances. These measures allow researchers to examine both shared and distinct drivers of different forms of extremism and their implications for social cohesion and democratic stability. The harmonized dataset integrates information from both main survey waves and accompanying pretests and is documented using consistent variable naming and standardized documentation.