Competing for Loyalists? How Party Positioning Affects Populist Radical Right Voting

2021/03/16 by Winston Chou, Rafaela Dancygier, Naoki Egami +2 · 2 voices · 68 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Economics #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #Law #Loyalty #Mainstream #Media Influence and Politics #Political economy #Political science #Politics #Populism #Populism, Right-Wing Movements #Position (finance) #Psychology #Radical right #Salience (neuroscience) #Status quo #Voting

paper · doi:10.1177/0010414021997166

published in Comparative Political Studies 54(12), 2226-2260 (SAGE Publishing)

openalex publication_date 2021/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

As populist radical right parties muster increasing support in many democracies, an important question is how mainstream parties can recapture their voters. Focusing on Germany, we present original panel evidence that voters supporting the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)—the country’s largest populist radical right party—resemble partisan loyalists with entrenched anti-establishment views, seemingly beyond recapture by mainstream parties. Yet this loyalty does not only reflect anti-establishment voting, but also gridlocked party-issue positioning. Despite descriptive evidence of strong party loyalty, experimental evidence reveals that many AfD voters change allegiances when mainstream parties accommodate their preferences. However, for most parties this repositioning is extremely costly. While mainstream parties can attract populist radical right voters via restrictive immigration policies, they alienate their own voters in doing so. Examining position shifts across issue dimensions, parties, and voter groups, our research demonstrates that, absent significant changes in issue preferences or salience, the status quo is an equilibrium.

Citations

• What Unites Right-Wing Populists in Western Europe?
• The Evolution of the Immigration Debate: Evidence from a New Dataset of Party Positions Over the Last Half-Century

Cited by

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• Communicating a common front: mainstream party rhetoric and affective polarisation towards the radical right
• Immigration and social citizenship in times of crisis: deepening and broadening citizenship
• Media Platforming and the Normalisation of Extreme Right Views
• Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties
• Legitimize or Delegitimize? Mainstream Party Strategy toward (Former) Pariah Parties and How Voters Respond
• Does mainstream populism work? Populist rhetoric and the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties
• Downplaying Extremism? How the State Approaches Right-Wing and Left-Wing Extremist Threats
• When does accommodation fail? The electoral consequences of intra-party divisions and mainstream party strategies
• The Green Transition and Political Polarization Along Occupational Lines
• Partisan affect and political tolerance in the context of shifting norms: the effect of coalition signals towards the radical right
• Who benefits from the social democratic march to the middle?
• Under pressure? How regional dominant parties shift their EU positions when challenged by Euroskeptic parties
• When everyone talks about migration: how mainstream parties shift to the right and still lose
• Authenticity Over Imitation: Lessons from the 2025 German Election
• Fighting for a Lost Cause? Availability of Populist Radical Right Voters for Established Parties. The Case of Germany
• Continuity and change: The role of nativism and gender attitudes in the long-term dynamics of radical right party support
• Testing the backlash argument: voter responses to (pro-)immigration reforms
• Have populist right supporters’ views on refugee policy radicalized under the Ukrainian crisis? Evidence from a three-wave survey experiment
• Emigration and radical right populism

Discussions

• And experimental evidence suggests that those losses would likely offset any gains from the AfD: doi.org/10.1177/0010... (Figure 9). [bsky, 5 points, 0 comments]
• This one here: doi.org/10.1177/0010... [bsky, 2 points, 1 comments]

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• Fighting for a Lost Cause? Availability of Populist Radical Right Voters for Established Parties. The Case of Germany
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• The Changing Face of the AfD Electorate—A Longitudinal Analysis from 2013 to 2022
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