Dataset Information

Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany.

ABSTRACT: With the rise of populism in many countries, including Germany, it is more important than ever to better understand the causes and consequences of populist support. Using two experiments within the context of a large panel survey, we study how support for the German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is associated with subjective perceptions of personal and financial well-being. In both experiments, we rely on priming the identity of AfD supporters, once in a controlled manner and once in a natural setting. We document a causal relationship from AfD support to diminished well-being for new and marginal AfD supporters. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that causality moves unidirectionally, from life dissatisfaction to support for populist parties, and suggest that early interventions focusing on positive messages are particularly promising to win voters back into the mainstream.

SUBMITTER: Adena M

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11207160 | biostudies-literature | 2024

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany.

Adena Maja M Huck Steffen S

PloS one 20240626 6

With the rise of populism in many countries, including Germany, it is more important than ever to better understand the causes and consequences of populist support. Using two experiments within the context of a large panel survey, we study how support for the German right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is associated with subjective perceptions of personal and financial well-being. In both experiments, we rely on priming the identity of AfD supporters, once in a controlled ...[more]

PMID: 38923951

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Project description:Since 2015, far right parties drawing heavily on radical anti-refugee rhetoric gained electoral support in Germany while the number of political hate crimes targeting refugees rose. Both phenomena - far right electoral support and prevalence of right-wing hate crimes - have theoretically and empirically been linked with socio-structural and contextual variables. However, systematic empirical research on these links is scattered and scarce at best. We combine official statistics on political hate crimes targeting refugees in Germany and far right electoral support of the far right party "Alternative für Deutschland" (AfD) in the German national elections 2017 with socio-structural variables (proportion of foreigners and unemployment rate) and survey data collected in a representative survey (N = 1,506) in 2016. We aggregate and combine data for all German municipalities except Berlin which were the level of analysis for the current study. In path analyses, we find socio-structural variables to be unrelated with each other but significantly correlated with both criterion variables in a systematic fashion: proportion of foreigners was negatively while unemployment rate was positively linked with far right electoral support. Right-wing crime was linked positively with unemployment rate across Germany and positively with proportion of foreigners only in East Germany while proportion of foreigners was unrelated to right-wing crime in West Germany. When including survey measures into the model, they were linked with socio-structural variables in the predicted fashion - intergroup contact correlated positively with proportion of foreigners, collective deprivation correlated positively with unemployment rates, and both predicted extreme right-wing attitudes. However, their contribution to the explained variance in outcome variables above and beyond socio-structural variables was neglectable. We argue that both far right-wing electoral support and right-wing hate crime can be conceptualized as behavioral forms of political extremism shaped through socio-structural and contextual factors and discuss implications for preventing political extremism.

Dataset Information

Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany.

Publications

Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany.

Similar Datasets

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