The Impact of Election Information Shocks on Populist Party Preferences: Evidence from Germany

Gerling Lena, Kellermann Kim Leonie

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.

Keywords
Voting behavior populist parties contagion effects information shocks social desirability bias