Voting against parties: populist attitudes, party supply, and support for non-partisan actors

Abstract

ABSTRACT A growing corpus of literature analyzes the effect of populist attitudes on voting behavior with a special focus on support for populist radical-right parties. In this paper, we argue that high levels of populist attitudes also affect the probability to support non-partisan actors that present themselves as an alternative to party-centered representation. We provide empirical evidence for this claim based on observational and experimental data in the context of German local elections. We first show that populist attitudes positively affect the probability to vote for non-partisan actors. We then use a choice experiment to demonstrate that populist voters are more likely than non-populist voters to support a non-partisan over a party representative in elections. Our findings have important implications for understanding the success of non-partisan actors in elections as well as the political preferences of populist citizens.