Political Potentials, Deep-Seated Nativism and the Success of the German AfD

Julia Schulte-Cloos

doi:10.3389/fpos.2021.698085

Abstract

The German populist radical right party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD) was founded amid various economic and political crises. This article argues that the electoral success of this political challenger, however, is rooted in more than the upsurge of populist resentments born out of these crises. Integrating theories about the activation of attitudes with arguments about the effects of exposure to local political contexts, I contend that the electoral success of the AfD reflects the mobilization of deep-seated nativist sentiments. To test these propositions, I draw on a large panel dataset of the AfD’s electoral returns at the municipal level (N = 10,694) which I link to pre-crises data on the marginal success of extreme-right parties. Exploiting variation between municipalities located within the same county (N = 294), I estimate a series of spatial simultaneous autoregressive error models by maximum likelihood estimation. The results show that the success of the AfD is rooted in the local prevalence of nativist sentiments that date prior to the crises that fomented the formation of the challenger party–an effect that becomes stronger in the course of the radicalization of the AfD. I further demonstrate that the populist right AfD is best able to broaden its electoral appeal among local communities with an extreme-right sub-culture, particularly in Eastern Germany. This suggests that even small extreme-right networks can act as a breeding ground for the populist right and help spread xenophobic and nativist sentiments among citizens.

Highlights

The literature that tries to understand the rise of populist radical right parties across Europe argues that these parties’ electoral successes originate in two distinct social processes
This study has argued that the electoral success of the populist right AfD is rooted in the activation of such culturally conservative sentiments that present latent political potentials for the populist right
Integrating theories of attitude activation with accounts of political socialization within local political contexts, the article contended that the electoral appeal of the populist right challenger AfD is most pronounced in local communities with high levels of latent yet deep-seated nativist and xenophobic sentiments

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The literature that tries to understand the rise of populist radical right parties across Europe argues that these parties’ electoral successes originate in two distinct social processes. The prevalence of deep-seated nativist attitudes among parts of a local community—evident in the explicit electoral expression of nativist attitudes prior to sequential experience of the European financial and migration crises and prior to the existence of a viable populist right party within the German party system—may shape the local environment within a community, carrying critical effects for attitude formation among community members and their political socialization In such communities, the populist right newcomer AfD should be able to disproportionally amplify its electoral success and readily broaden its electoral appeal over time. The dependent variable y is the level/growth of the vote for the populist right AfD and X is a vector of explanatory variables

RESULTS

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT