Between Thin- and Host-ideologies: How Populist Attitudes Interact with Policy Preferences in Shaping Voting Behaviour

ABSTRACT

Understanding populism as a thin-centred ideology implies that it is in need for a host ideology in order to be successful. In addition to being populist, populist parties have to give substantial, policy-related answers to political problems. Even though this twofold structure is an often-debated topic in theory, there is rather little attention payed to the question of how this relationship affects voting behaviour. Using Germany after the 2017 general election as a case, we want to study the demand side of populism and focus on the voters of the Alternative für Deutschland (Alternative for Germany, AfD) and Die Linke (Left Party). Comparing voters of a populist radical right and left party enables us to find out more about the interaction of populist attitudes and policy preferences at the individual level and how they affect electoral behaviour.

KEYWORDS:

• Populism
• AfD
• Die Linke
• voting behaviour
• populist attitudes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for comments and advice from the editors of this Special Issue Annika Werner and Heiko Giebler and two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. We like to thank the participants at the Workshop ‘Minding the Gap? The Populist Surge and its Consequences for Representation’ and especially Alexia Katsanidou for her helpful comments. We also like to thank Paula Jöst and Jette Bergen for their support with this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on Contributors

Thorsten Faas is Professor of Political Sociology at the Otto Suhr Institute of Political Science, Free University Berlin. In his research, he focuses on elections, electoral behaviour and political communication.

Nicole Loew is a PhD student and research associate at the Centre for Political Sociology at the Free University Berlin. Her research focuses on political behaviour and populism at the supply- and demand-side. E-mail: [email protected]

Notes

1 If we look – based on our data – at the 2017 German Federal Election from a demand-side angle, we find further support for this classification: Voters of AfD and Die Linke on average hold populist attitudes, voters of the other parties do not.

2 The exploratory factor analysis yields a fourth factor with an Eigenvalue of 1.09, just surpassing the crucial threshold of 1. Given that the 3-factor-solution is readily interpretable in substantive terms, which the 4-factor-solution is not, we have decided to go with 3 factors; see Appendix 1 for details.

3 We ran all our models with two versions of the dependent variable, the difference between them being whether voters for the other populist party are included in the reference category or not. The choice does not affect our results substantially. As we are interested in discriminating between populist parties, the results shown in the following are based on models that include the other populist party in the reference category.

4 We add policy preferences as well as interaction terms simultaneously. Still, the main effects discussed in the following are virtually identical to the effects that emerge would we only include the policy preferences without interaction terms.

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge support from the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.