Tuesday Seminar – 1 September 2020

Electoral Participation, Political Disaffection, and the Rise of the Populist Radical Right       

Julia Schulte-Cloos, LMU Research Fellow

(On Zoom, 12h-13h)

Does the populist radical right benefit from increased electoral mobilization? This article contributes to understanding radical right success by analyzing variation in local turnout surges in all nation-wide elections in Germany since the foundation of the German populist radical right AfD. Relying on a novel panel dataset of more than 10.000 German municipalities and city districts, we demonstrate that the populist right draws advantage from increased electoral mobilization. This effect, however, only holds in local communities marked by high levels of political disaffection, whereas increased mobilization even acts to depress the fortune of the radical right under conditions of low political disaffection. In shedding light on the interplay between disaffection and popular mobilization, this study has important implications for understanding the surge of the populist radical right in established democracies.

This content has been updated on 6 December 2021 at 9 h 29 min.