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The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course?
Populist parties enjoy stable support in various European countries. The literature on the rise of populism argues that this support especially increases in times of crises. Surprisingly, the German right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did not increase its support in the wake of the...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9058757/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35531264 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11615-022-00398-3 |
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author | Bayerlein, Michael Metten, Anne |
author_facet | Bayerlein, Michael Metten, Anne |
author_sort | Bayerlein, Michael |
collection | PubMed |
description | Populist parties enjoy stable support in various European countries. The literature on the rise of populism argues that this support especially increases in times of crises. Surprisingly, the German right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did not increase its support in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the party even lost 2.3 percentage points in the 2021 federal election. We address this puzzle and ask why the AfD has not been able to use the crisis to its advantage. Our main argument in answering this question is that, although the AfD pursued the classic populist strategy of fundamental opposition, the support base of the AfD is strongly divided on the preference towards measures containing the spread of COVID-19. This division is reinforced by individual affectedness by the pandemic. Introducing a novel weekly dataset on voter preferences, we show that the AfD support base is strongly divided on the issue with approval of the government measures being a significant and substantial contributor to vote switching away from the AfD. Using regional-level data and a difference-in-differences approach, we further show that western German regions hit especially hard by the pandemic display a lower AfD vote share than other regions. Our findings have important implications for the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral competition and also on the future of populist parties. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9058757 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-90587572022-05-02 The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? Bayerlein, Michael Metten, Anne Polit Vierteljahresschr Critical Paper Populist parties enjoy stable support in various European countries. The literature on the rise of populism argues that this support especially increases in times of crises. Surprisingly, the German right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) did not increase its support in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the party even lost 2.3 percentage points in the 2021 federal election. We address this puzzle and ask why the AfD has not been able to use the crisis to its advantage. Our main argument in answering this question is that, although the AfD pursued the classic populist strategy of fundamental opposition, the support base of the AfD is strongly divided on the preference towards measures containing the spread of COVID-19. This division is reinforced by individual affectedness by the pandemic. Introducing a novel weekly dataset on voter preferences, we show that the AfD support base is strongly divided on the issue with approval of the government measures being a significant and substantial contributor to vote switching away from the AfD. Using regional-level data and a difference-in-differences approach, we further show that western German regions hit especially hard by the pandemic display a lower AfD vote share than other regions. Our findings have important implications for the impact of exogenous shocks on electoral competition and also on the future of populist parties. Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2022-05-02 2022 /pmc/articles/PMC9058757/ /pubmed/35531264 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11615-022-00398-3 Text en © The Author(s) 2022 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . |
spellingShingle | Critical Paper Bayerlein, Michael Metten, Anne The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title | The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title_full | The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title_fullStr | The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title_full_unstemmed | The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title_short | The Impact of COVID-19 on the Support for the German AfD: Jumping the Populist Ship or Staying the Course? |
title_sort | impact of covid-19 on the support for the german afd: jumping the populist ship or staying the course? |
topic | Critical Paper |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9058757/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35531264 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11615-022-00398-3 |
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