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Abstract
Using the 2017 post-election German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), this article examines the voters for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the 2017 German federal election. We show that AfD voters in 2017 were truly ‘flesh of the same flesh’ of the mainstream German political parties, with the AfD drawing its voters from across the political party spectrum as well as from previous non-voters in 2013. In contrast to previous scholarship, we find that in most respects AfD voters in 2017 did not differ demographically from voters for all other parties, be that in terms of gender, education, employment status, and union membership. Furthermore, we find that AfD voters were not driven by anxiety about their own economic situation: they are no ‘losers of globalisation.’ Instead, AfD voters in 2017 were driven solely by two factors: their attitudes towards immigrants/refugees and anti-establishment sentiment/satisfaction with democracy in Germany.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Michael A. Hansen (corresponding author) is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Political Science at Lunds Universitet and an Assistant Professor in the Politics, Philosophy, and Law Department at the University of Wisconsin – Parkside. His research focuses on parties of the radical right and political behaviour in the U.S. and Europe.
Jonathan Olsen is professor and chair of the Department of History and Government, Texas Woman's University. His research focuses on parties of the radical right and radical left in Germany, Europe, and the European Union.
Notes
1 The Post-Election, Cross-Sectional German Longitudinal Study used here is version 1.0.0, which was released on 12/21/17.
2 It should be noted that the literature on conceptualising far right parties or populist radical right parties in Europe contains substantial debate: throughout different periods a lack of conceptual agreement is striking (Betz Citation1994; Kitschelt Citation1995; Canovan Citation1999; Givens Citation2005; Mudde Citation2007; Hainsworth Citation2008; Copsey Citation2008). Since the level of analysis in this research agenda solely explores vote choice for AfD, it is outside the bounds of this article to fully engage in this debate. However, the debate in the literature on how to define the AfD and whether it can be classified as a populist radical right party is summarised here.
3 In contrast to the studies by Schmitt-Beck (Citation2017) and Dilling (Citation2018), we do not test how AfD voters are different from all other voters cumulatively in the electoral market. Instead, we test how AfD voters differ from voters for each and every party. We do not make the same methodological assumption as these scholars, which is that voters for all other parties are statistically the same. For example, when these scholars have coded AfD vote a 1 and votes for all other parties a 0, they are arguing that voters for the CDU/CSU are statistically the same as voters for the SPD, Greens, and the Left Party when compared to AfD voters. Our analysis demonstrates that the assumption does not hold under statistical testing.
4 In the German electoral system parties may earn more seats than they are entitled to by the second vote (PR) if their number of first vote seats won in a state exceeds the number of seats determined through the second vote. This is the so-called ‘overhang mandate.’
5 Variable coding, descriptive statistics, and any statistical tests performed for creating the independent variables (i.e. Cronbach's Alpha scores, factor analysis, and binary correlation tests) can be accessed online from the corresponding author.
6 Political participation was included in the original analysis. However, there was little variation on the variables used.
7 The second largest 2017 vote share for voters that did not vote in the 2013 election was for the CDU/CSU, which may be surprising.
8 The average effects plots were created using the DAMisc R package (Armstrong Citation2016). The command to create the plots produces a plot of average effects for one variable while holding the others constant at observed values.