Social media use and support for populist radical right parties: assessing exposure and selection effects in a two-wave panel study

ABSTRACT

Vote shares for populist radical right parties (PRRPs) have increased considerably in recent years, and this advancement of PRRPs has been attributed in part to social media. We assess the affinity between social media and populist radical right parties by examining a) whether more frequent social media use for news enhances the willingness to vote for a PRRP (exposure effect) as well as b) whether individuals who have voted for a PRRP in the past use social media more frequently to access news (selection effect). To address these research questions, we analysed data of a two-wave survey study that was conducted in Germany, focusing on the party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Binary logistic regression highlighted that social media use increased the likelihood of supporting the AfD. Pre-registered multinominal analyses, however, showed that this effect was driven by specific party comparisons. That is, using the AfD as a reference category, social media use reduced intentions to vote for parties that expressed similar positions as the AfD on the issue of immigration and with which the PRRP competes over votes. Social media selection effects were not supported.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• voting
• populist radical right
• media effects
• media selection

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

Data associated with this research is available for download here: https://osf.io/pgz5r/?view_only=2676d81b23d24ac9afb0e247d3b5fe89

Notes

1 See also Schulz (2018), who showed that populist attitudes are positively related with use of Facebook but negatively associated with Twitter use for news.

2 See: https://osf.io/yftwq/register/5730e99a9ad5a102c5745a8a.

3 See: https://osf.io/pgz5r/?view_only=2676d81b23d24ac9afb0e247d3b5fe89.

4 CDU/CSU = Christian Democratic Union of Germany/Christian Social Union, SPD = Social Democratic Party of Germany, FDP = Free Democratic Party.

5 Note that this approach differs from the pre-registration. See supplementary material S1 for more information.

6 Please note that the variable parameters used in the analysis by the statistical software are such that ‘having voted for the AfD’ is denoted with zero and ‘not having voted for the AfD’ is denoted with one. This analysis was conducted using SPSS 25.0.

7 The answer option ‘Other’ was not combined with open text answers. It is therefore not possible to specify the type of other parties that people had voted for to conclude, for instance, the party’s stance on immigration.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development under [grant number FA2386-15-1-0003], awarded to Professor James Liu at Massey University in New Zealand.

Notes on contributors

Sandy Schumann

Sandy Schumann is a post-doctoral research associate at the Department of Security and Crime Science, University College London, UK. She completed her PhD in social psychology at Université Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium and has worked previously at the Oxford Centre for the Study of Intergroup Conflict. Sandy's research assesses risk factors of radicalisation, extreme political attitudes, and support for populist radical right groups in diverse, digital societies.

Diana Boer

Diana Boer is a professor for social and organisational psychology at the University of Koblenz-Landau in Koblenz, Germany. She received her PhD from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and taught in Taipei, Bremen and Frankfurt before moving to Koblenz. Her research investigates how cultural and environmental factors impact on attitudes, behaviours and motivations, in particular those that facilitate cooperation, well-being and prosocial values.

Katja Hanke

Katja Hanke (PhD, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand) is professor for psychology at the University of Applied Management Studies in Mannheim, Germany. After completing post-doctoral fellowships in Taiwan and at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences (BIGSSS) in Germany, she was a university lecturer and Marie Curie Fellow at BIGSSS at Jacobs University Bremen as well as a senior researcher at GESIS-Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Mannheim. Her research interests include intercultural relations, acculturation, applied social psychology, and measurement invariance testing.

James Liu

James Liu is professor and head of the School of Psychology at Massey University in New Zealand. He taught at Victoria University of Wellington for twenty years, becoming professor and co-director of its Centre for Applied Cross-Cultural Research. His work is in social, cross-cultural, and political psychology, specialising in social representations of history and identity politics; in life, he is happily a “Chinese-American-New Zealander”.