📢 Our article on electoral participation, political disaffection and the rise of the populist right has just been published in Party Politics. The article is co-authored with Arndt Leininger.
Previous studies that address the rise of the populist radical right have highlighted two theoretical mechanisms: first, advantages that populist right actors enjoy vis-à -vis other party actors, and second, their capacity to mobilize politically disaffected citizens. As the rise of the radical right has been coupled with the electoral decline of mainstream parties across Western Europe, many studies focus on the first mechanism and study voters’ electoral shifts from conservative or social democratic parties to rising radical right competitors. Voters gravitate towards the radical right due to the increased public salience of anti-immigration proposals and the radical right’s ‘ownership’ of this issue.
Several studies, however, also document that an increasingly large share of the electorate harbors stable and deep-seated feelings of political distrust, which prevents them from being captured by any established party. They channel their discontent in electoral abstention or, when mobilized, vote for a populist party. According to these theoretical accounts, the populist radical right is particularly likely to benefit from the mobilization of distrustful and politically disaffected voters. This second mechanism that potentially fuels the success of the populist right, however, has received much less scholarly attention, and existing accounts have provided inconclusive findings.
In our article, we argue that the populist radical right benefits from increased electoral participation, but that this effect is conditional upon voters’ level of political disaffection.
Integrating theories of populist attitudes with accounts of party competition in Western Europe, we contend that populist right actors only draw electoral advantage from turnout surges when voters harbor deep-seated feelings of political distrust and alienation. When citizens do not harbor such populist sentiments or political grievances, in contrast, we posit that turnout surges act to decrease the prospects of the populist radical right by amplifying the representation of plural and diverse policy preferences.
To investigate these propositions empirically, we exploit the fact that the German party system, until recently, was lacking a populist radical right party. Previous research emphasizes the role of the populist right in inciting and fueling political discontent among the public. Thus, to understand how political discontent conditions the relationship between electoral mobilization and the success of the radical right, we investigate the effect of electoral participation as a function of pre-existing levels of political disaffection that date to before the existence of the ‘Alternative für Deutschland’ (AfD).
Our analysis draws on a novel panel dataset of disaggregated election data, which covers the electoral results of more than 10,000 German municipalities and city districts in six nation-wide elections between 2009 and 2019. Building on the literature of political distrust and its implications for electoral behavior, we propose to measure pre-existing political disaffection by an index that considers the rates of abstention and invalid voting within a local community relative to the regional average.
To identify the effect of turnout surges that are exogenous to the mobilization efforts of the party, we link the municipality panel to data on the geographical scope of the AfD’s local party branches and rely on a difference-in-differences design.
Our findings show that the populist right benefits from increased electoral participation in communities characterized by high levels of pre-existing political disaffection. The size of this effect is also substantively large. We predict that the electoral gains for the populist right are around 1.2 percentage points larger in response to a turnout surge than its average gains in equally strongly disaffected municipalities that do not see a turnout surge.
This shows that the electoral mobilization of politically alienated parts of the electorate feeds into the success of the radical right. Our results, however, also demonstrate that increased popular participation acts to impede the success of the populist right whenever turnout surges do not reflect the mobilization of ‘anti-system citizens’. During European Parliament (EP) elections, which are marked by low electoral salience and widespread electoral abstention, even among voters who are otherwise not politically alienated, turnout surges appear to increase the representation of plural policy preferences. In communities without a history of political disaffection, the radical right stands to lose when large numbers of citizens get out to vote.
The results of this article contribute to our understanding of the populist radical right’s success by drawing attention to the interplay between political disaffection and electoral mobilization. In line with theories of political grievances and populist sentiments, our results highlight that the populist radical right benefits from increased participation among politically alienated parts of the electorate. In demonstrating, however, that citizens’ increased electoral engagement diminishes the prospects of the populist radical right under conditions of low political disaffection, the results of our study appear encouraging as they point to the potential limits of the rise of the radical right. Our study sheds light on the electoral prospects of the populist right in light of a recent trend toward increasing participation levels in some Western European democracies.
👉 Check out the full paper, which is available open access at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354068820985186.