The impact of election information shocks on populist party preferences: Evidence from Germany

Lena Gerling and Kim Leonie Kellermann

No 3/2019, CIW Discussion Papers from University of Münster, Center for Interdisciplinary Economics (CIW)

Abstract: Despite controversial debates about the social acceptability of its nationalist program, the rightwing populist AfD has recently entered all state parliaments as well as the federal parliament in Germany. Although professed AfD voters faced a likely risk of social stigmatization, electoral support followed a clear upward trend. In order to explain these dynamics, we analyze the impact of information shocks with respect to aggregate-level AfD support on individual party choices. Unexpectedly high aggregate support for a populist party may indicate a higher social acceptance of its platform and reduce the social desirability bias in self-reported party preferences. Consequently, the likelihood to reveal an AfD preference increases. We test this mechanism in an event-study approach, exploiting quasi-random variation in survey interviews conducted closely around German state elections. We define election information shocks as deviations of actual AfD vote shares from pre-election polls and link these to the individual disposition to report an AfD preference in subsequent survey interviews. Our results suggest that exposure to higher-than expected AfD support significantly increases the individual probability to report an AfD vote intention by up to 3 percentage points.

Keywords: voting behavior; populist parties; contagion effects; information shocks; socialdesirability bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C21 D71 D72 D83 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-eur and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:ciwdps:32019

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