Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/203247 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
CIW Discussion Paper No. 3/2019
Publisher: 
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Centrum für Interdisziplinäre Wirtschaftsforschung (CIW), Münster
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.
Subjects: 
voting behavior
populist parties
contagion effects
information shocks
socialdesirability bias
JEL: 
C21
D71
D72
D83
D91
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.