Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany

Adena, Maja; Huck, Steffen Article — Published Version Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany PLOS ONE Provided in Cooperation with: WZB Berlin Social Science Center Suggested Citation: Adena, Maja; Huck, Steffen (2024) : Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany, PLOS ONE, ISSN 1932-6203, Public Library of Science, San Francisco, CA, Vol. 19, Iss. 6, pp. 1-16, https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/311283 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. 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If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ RESEARCH ARTICLE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany Maja AdenaID 1☯ *, Steffen Huck 1,2☯ 1Research Unit Economics of Change, WZB Berlin, Berlin, Germany, 2Department of Economics, UCL London, London, United Kingdom ☯These authors contributed equally to this work. *[email protected] Abstract With the rise of populism in many countries, including Germany, it is more important than ever to better understand the causes and consequences of populist support. Using two experiments within the context of a large panel survey, we study how support for the German right-wing populist party Alternative fu ¨r Deutschland (AfD) is associated with subjective perceptions of personal and financial well-being. In both experiments, we rely on priming the identity of AfD supporters, once in a controlled manner and once in a natural setting. We document a causal relationship from AfD support to diminished well-being for new and marginal AfD supporters. Our findings challenge the prevailing assumption that causality moves unidirectionally, from life dissatisfaction to support for populist parties, and suggest that early interventions focusing on positive messages are particularly promising to win voters back into the mainstream. Introduction With the surge of populism in various countries, including Germany, it is now more crucial than ever to gain a better understanding of the causes and consequences of populist support. At the beginning of 2024, the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland, AfD, surpassed 20% in national German polls [1,2]. Remarkably, in all East German states except Berlin, it became the strongest party [3]. What do voters experience when they turn to a party such as the AfD? This is an important question as any change in the emotional states of voters who turn to an extremist populist party might have repercussions for how to optimally defend liberal democracy. Is it a surge of happiness that voters experience by finally taking a stance against the mainstream? There is a large body of literature suggesting that this might be the case. Taking a stance goes along with establishing a sense of self-determination and agency, which are seen as important for wellbeing (see, for example, [4] or [5], who build on self-determination theory). It may also reduce cognitive dissonance [6] and induce a sense of achievement through embracing a goal, which has also been shown to boost happiness (see, for example, [7] or [8]). Finally, taking a stance PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 1 / 16 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Adena M, Huck S (2024) Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being: Experimental and survey evidence from Germany. PLoS ONE 19(6): e0303133. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 Editor: Holger A. Rau, Georg-August-Universita¨t Go¨ttingen: Georg-August-Universitat Gottingen, GERMANY Received: November 21, 2022 Accepted: April 20, 2024 Published: June 26, 2024 Copyright: ©2024 Adena, Huck. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are available from GESIS at DOI: https://doi.org/10.7802/2714. Funding: MA gratefully acknowledges financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, https://www.dfg.de/) through collaborative research center CRC TRR 190 (project number 280092119). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. can serve as a successful strategy for coping with stress and increase well-being through stress alleviation [9,10]. But there are also reasons to believe that voters might experience deteriorations in wellbeing when they swear allegiance to a populist party such as the AfD. Right-wing movements thrive on a rhetoric of negativity, swamping their supporters with negatively framed topics and news [11–14]. Also, right-wing populist communication strategies strongly rely on negative emotions [15] and fear [16], and populist messages are often characterized by assigning blame to elites in an emotionalized way [17]. Such negative messages are likely to “infect” recipients through emotional contagion, a phenomenon well established in the literature [18, 19] that has negative repercussions for well-being. For example, exposure to especially negative news on TV has been shown to have an adverse effect on viewers’ mental well-being, triggering anxiety and sadness [20,21], and the reporting of mass violence has been shown to induce significant distress [22]. Even with short exposure to news on the 9/11 attacks, individuals reported negative emotions, such as shock, fear, and anger [23–25], while as an effect of long exposure, people became more anxious and emotional [26–28] and reported higher levels of posttraumatic stress disorder symptoms [29]. In a similar vein, recent studies relating to COVID-19 have shown that exposure to negative news about the pandemic triggered depression symptoms [30], increased self-reported mental distress [31], and was correlated with more severe self-reported mental health symptoms [32] and reductions in positive affect and optimism [33]. On the other hand, news stories featuring others’ kindness have been shown to have the potential to undo the aversive effects of negative news [34]. In the party context, which we study here, negative populist appeals have been shown to trigger negative emotions in their supporters [35]. We summarize the two potential paths by which the decision to support the AfD can affect individual well-being in Fig 1. Having good reasons for expecting effects in either direction, we embark on providing causal evidence for the consequences of support for a right-wing party on well-being. Understanding the psychological consequences of such a choice is important for at least two reasons: They may inform the content and timing of interventions designed to win voters back into the mainstream. If voters experience surges of happiness when joining the populists’ ranks, promising interventions will ultimately have to tackle the topics championed by the populists and will have to wait until initial surges in well-being ebb. In contrast, if voters experience a deterioration in well-being, effective interventions will embrace different topics not laden with the same negativity and will be swift. We examine the consequences of supporting a right-wing populist party on well-being, utilizing two experiments in the context of a panel survey in Germany. Both experiments rely on identity priming, but they differ in the way the priming arises. In one experiment, the priming is fully controlled through a module within the survey; in the other, we exploit naturally occurring differences in exposure to news about the AfD over time. Both experiments exhibit the same robust pattern: Voters with a new and not-yet-fully-formed identity as AfD supporters who are reminded of their allegiance to the AfD report diminished well-being. The effect is weaker (in the controlled experiment) or reversed (in the natural experiment) for other AfD supporters. This suggests that it is the initial decision to support a right-wing party that has the most profound negative effect on well-being. Materials and methods Data We collected data from four waves of a survey gathered for us by YouGov Germany in 2019, 2020, and twice in 2021—before and after the federal elections. In wave 1, in December 2019, PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 2 / 16 Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. we sampled 5,078 respondents. These were composed of a representative sample of German voters consisting of 4,094 respondents, to which we added 984 additional randomly drawn AfD supporters based on self-reported voting in the 2017 federal elections recorded by YouGov. This generated a total of 1,397 voters who voted for the AfD in 2017. We oversampled AfD voters in order to increase the power for tests that compare AfD supporters with nonsupporters and to increase the number of those respondents who switched party allegiance. In wave 2, in November/December 2020 we re-contacted all respondents from 2019 and received responses from 3,864 participants, or 76% of the full 2019 sample. In this wave, we exploit the fact that the AfD federal party convention took place on November 28–29, 2020, right in the middle of our sampling window (November 23–December 14, 2020). This furnishes us with a natural experiment, on which more details will follow below. In wave 3, from the end of August until a few days before the federal elections held on September 26, 2021, we re-invited all previous participants, of whom 3,359 took part again, and we added a new fresh sample, consisting of 1,451 2017 AfD voters and 251 non-AfD voters, generating a total of 5,061 participants. In wave 4, in November/December 2021, we invited all participants from the three Fig 1. Two potential paths by which the decision to support the AfD can affect individual well-being. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133.g001 PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 3 / 16 previous waves and achieved a response rate of 86%, generating a total of 4,342 participants. This wave contained an experimental module, which is explained below in more detail. A WZB Research Ethics Review (2021/0/130) has been obtained for the experimental part of the study. Data collection was done by YouGov. YouGov obtained informed consent in written form when the participants registered with the platform. Due to the collection of answers pertaining to questions about political orientation and health, YouGov obtained additional written consent in each wave of the survey, and the participants always had the option to withdraw from the survey or skip sensitive questions. AfD support measurement. We collected information on retrospective voting behavior in the parliamentary elections in 2017 and 2021 and on voting intentions using the standard question: “If the federal elections were next Sunday, which party would you vote for?” This allows us to distinguish between new and previous AfD voters. As answers related to AfD support might be affected by experimental conditions, we define our target groups for the controlled experiment (new versus other AfD supporters) on the basis of responses in the previous wave. In the controlled experiment, we exploit a question from the previous wave that asked about participants’ voting intentions in the upcoming parliamentary elections and asked when participants made their decision. We classify those who indicated intentions to vote for the AfD and stated that they did not make this choice a long time ago as new AfD voters. In the natural experiment, we do not have a similar question from the previous wave but exploit the previous wave’s questions about the extent of support for the AfD party manifesto, classifying those with limited support for the manifesto as marginal AfD voters, who we then compare to other AfD voters. Well-being measurement. The literature on populism has tended to focus on measures of income or subjective measures of personal dissatisfaction at an absolute level (through elicited agreement with statements such as “my life is close to ideal” or “I am satisfied with my life”) or through explicit comparisons with others. We instead measure well-being by focusing on internal change, asking respondents to compare their current situation with the previous year or to measure their expectations for the future compared with the present. We made this choice following previous research that has shown that reference points are useful in increasing informativeness [36,37]. Without explicitly providing reference points, individuals might draw on reference points that are unknown to the researcher, making comparisons difficult and introducing noise. Furthermore, prior research has shown that people make intrapersonal comparisons more often than interpersonal ones and that they consider the former to be more important [38]. In addition, Germany is a notable exception with respect to the “losers of globalization” theory [39]: for the German AfD, there is broad agreement in the literature (which relies on interpersonal comparisons) that neither variables related to low socio-economic status, such as education, income, occupational prestige, or unemployment, nor subjective perceptions of one’s adverse personal (economic) situation are related to AfD support [40–45]. An exception is Pesthy et al. [46], who, however, interestingly ask respondents about their “current” economic situation, thus also encouraging an intrapersonal comparison. We conjectured that measurements relying on interpersonal comparisons may not capture feelings of misery that cannot be justified by objective comparisons with others and that this may plausibly change when we ask about purely internal comparisons. More specifically, in waves 2 to 4, we asked participants about their personal well-being and about their financial well-being compared to the previous year as well as about the outlook for the coming year (“When you think about the past year, how are you today personally [financially]? Better than in the past year; as well as in the past year; worse than in the past year” and “When you think about the coming year, how do you estimate you will be doing personally [financially] in comparison to today? Better than today; the same as today; worse than PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 4 / 16 today.”). Based on their responses, we created dummy variables indicating whether participants judge their situation to be worse than in the year before or expect it to get worse in the next year. The average of those four variables is our main indicator of well-being. Other variables We also collected data on general political attitudes, place of residency, socio-economic status, including household size and income, and financial well-being, and we use them as control variables. Table A1 in the S1 File provides some summary statistics by wave. Analysis Identity priming and subjective well-being—the controlled survey experiment We implemented a survey experiment priming political identity in wave 4 of our survey. To assign the participants to a particular party priming module, we asked which party they voted for in the parliamentary elections of 2021, which party they could imagine supporting, and which party program they partly or fully support. Those who had voted for the AfD, who could imagine voting for the AfD, or who support the AfD party program fully or partly were primed with their AfD identity. Hence, we do not just define AfD supporters as past voters but also as individuals who support the party and could imagine voting for the AfD. The remaining individuals were primed with questions on the party they indicated having voted for in 2021. In the priming module, participants were forced to think deeply about the party they now support. More specifically, participants were presented with seven key manifesto items and asked to which extent they agreed with those. They were also presented with names of three key party politicians and were asked how good they find their work and whether they wished they had more influence. In addition, they were asked to specify further reasons for their support of the respective party in an open text field. The exact formulation of those questions (translated into English) and basic summary statistics can be found in the Section B in S1 File. Importantly, half of the respondents received this module before the well-being section, while the other half received these questions afterwards. Among the respondents who received the questions pertaining to the AfD, there was close to 100% support for border controls and the deportation of refugees who have committed crimes as well as for the introduction of referendums in Germany according to the Swiss model. The other program points received support of 76–79%, with the exception of the proposed COVID-19 policy, which involved abandoning all measures completely; this attracted more limited support of 60%. The remaining respondents received the same type of questions but pertaining to the parties they voted for. The advantage of this approach is that we have full control over who is treated and who is not and who is primed with AfD topics versus another party’s topics. For the purpose of the analysis, among the individuals primed with the AfD, we distinguish between new and other AfD party supporters. As the distinction between new and other AfD party supporters could potentially be influenced by the order in which the questions in wave 4 were asked, we rely on wave-3 responses to classify individuals. Among individuals primed with AfD topics, we define a new AfD supporter as somebody who stated in wave 3 that they were going to vote for the AfD in the upcoming parliamentary elections but that they had not made this decision long ago. There are 252 individuals that fulfill these criteria (and for whom baseline characteristics are available). The remaining individuals, who received the priming PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 5 / 16 module, are classified as other AfD supporters. There are 1,471 individuals in this category. The remaining individuals—those who were not primed with AfD topics—are classified as nonsupporters. This group consists of 2,297 individuals. We created a “priming” dummy equal to one for participants who were confronted with the priming block on politics before the block on well-being. We also created a “no priming” dummy for participants who were confronted with the block on wellbeing before the block on politics. As for the measure of well-being, we created a variable indicating average well-being (higher values correspond to lower well-being), which is calculated as the average of nonmissing values of all four main well-being questions. We hypothesize that the well-being of AfD supporters will either be positively or negatively affected when they are confronted with AfD topics and that new supporters will be affected most. The first part of the hypothesis builds on the literature presented above. Taking a stance could affect well-being positively, or populist rhetoric centered around negative emotions could result in emotional contagion. The second part of the hypothesis builds on findings in Hameleers et al. [17], who find that emotionalized blame attributions in the context of populist communication show the strongest persuasiveness for citizens with weaker identities. It is also in line with Cohen [47], who find that participants with weaker party identification tend to be more influenced by party priming manipulations. In order to better structure the upcoming analysis, we formulate the following testable null hypotheses: H1: There is no priming effect for new AfD supporters. H2: The priming effect for new AfD supporters is not different from the effect for other AfD supporters. H3: The priming effect for new AfD supporters is not different from the effect for supporters of other parties. H4: There is no overall priming effect. We present our results in Table 1 (Column I) and visualize them in Fig 2 (left panel, Column II; the right panel of the Figure presents the results from the natural experiment, which will be explained in the next section). More specifically, we present coefficient estimates from an OLS regression without a constant, where each AfD status dummy (new, other, non-AfD) is interacted with the treatment dummies for priming or no priming. We also include a baseline set of control variables. This gives us the means for all status-treatment combinations that account for corrections for any differences in observables between those groups. At the bottom of Table 1, we provide test statistics for the above four hypotheses. First, we see that all AfD supporters report worse well-being than nonsupporters. We also see that, with priming, all three groups report higher deteriorations in well-being. Regarding an overall priming effect, we can reject H4. There is an overall priming effect. However, of the three groups, new AfD supporters are those whose well-being is most negatively influenced by priming, and we can reject H1. While we cannot reject the hypothesis that the effect for new AfD supporters is similar to the effect for other supporters (H2), we can reject the hypothesis that the effect is not different from the effect for non-AfD supporters (H3). Identity priming around the AfD federal party convention—the natural experiment In the previous section, we presented a survey experiment that allowed us to causally evaluate an effect of populist identity priming on well-being. While such an experiment allows for clean PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 6 / 16 Table 1. Causal effects of priming political identity in two experiments: Experimental module in Wave 4 and natural experiment in Wave 2. Experimental module in 2021 Natural experiment in 2020 Outcome variable: feeling worse score (average over four well-being questions) I II new (marginal) AfD x no priming A 0.113 (0.078) 0.159** (0.073) new (marginal) AfD x priming B 0.217*** (0.080) 0.193** (0.076) other AfD x no priming C 0.077 (0.073) 0.268*** (0.075) other AfD x priming D 0.102 (0.074) 0.199** (0.082) non AfD x no priming E -0.063 (0.072) 0.074 (0.070) non AfD x priming F -0.039 (0.073) 0.069 (0.071) vaccination block -0.013 (0.011) age 0.012*** (0.003) 0.008*** (0.003) age *age -0.000*** (0.000) -0.000** (0.000) eastern German states dummy -0.012 (0.014) -0.027* (0.016) Berlin dummy 0.007 (0.027) 0.009 (0.031) suburban dummy 0.008 (0.014) 0.001 (0.015) urban dummy -0.029** (0.014) -0.005 (0.014) secondary education dummy 0.025 (0.016) 0.008 (0.017) higher education entrance qualification dummy 0.017 (0.021) 0.007 (0.022) university degree dummy 0.057*** (0.019) 0.038* (0.020) self-employed dummy 0.008 (0.028) 0.055* (0.031) manual worker dummy -0.011 (0.018) 0.025 (0.020) executive worker dummy 0.005 (0.021) -0.034 (0.023) age 65+ dummy -0.028 (0.023) -0.040* (0.024) female dummy -0.019 (0.012) 0.011 (0.012) number of household members 0.007 (0.005) 0.011* (0.006) income -0.076*** (0.009) -0.058*** (0.010) income *income 0.004*** (0.001) 0.004*** (0.001) Observations 3,768 3,224 R 2 0.433 0.394 (Continued) PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 7 / 16 causal attribution of the effect to the manipulation, identity priming might not work in such a structured way in the field. Also, the results that we have observed could have arisen as a statistical artefact—after all, “one swallow doesn’t make a summer” [48]. Replications of once-established findings can greatly raise confidence in their veracity [49,50] and boost poststudy probabilities [48]. In this subsection, we ask whether we can replicate our previous results in a different—potentially more realistic—context. Such a context was delivered to us in wave 2, which allowed us to exploit the fact that the AfD federal party convention took place on November 28–29, 2020, in the middle of our sampling window, which ran from November 23 to December 14. The convention received considerable media attention, which serves as our prime. Although the primary goal of the convention was to formulate positions regarding social policy, in particular pertaining to the pension system, the convention ended with a lively internal dispute between the moderate and the more radical wing of the party that followed after the opening address by party chairman Jo¨rg Meuthen. This dispute was widely reported in the media. There was a spike in the number of press articles containing a phrase “AfD Parteitag” Table 1. (Continued) Experimental module in 2021 Natural experiment in 2020 Hypotheses: Wald test p-value H1: no priming effect on new (marginal) AfD A = B 0.024 0.278 H2: priming effect on new (marginal) AfD not different from the effect on strong AfD A-B = C-D 0.115 0.074 H3: priming effect on new (marginal) AfD not different from the effect on non AfD A-B = E-F 0.097 0.259 H4: no overall priming effect A-B = C-D = E-F = 0 0.018 0.345 Robust errors; Coefficient estimates from a linear regression without a constant. Income is individual income measured monthly in €1,000; vaccination block is the order of additional questions on vaccination before or after the well-being questions *p<0.10 ** p<0.05 *** p<0.01 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133.t001 Fig 2. Causal effects of priming political identity in two experiments: Experimental module in Wave 4 and natural experiment in Wave 2. Coefficient estimates from Table 1; thick lines—90% confidence intervals, thin lines—95% confidence intervals. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133.g002 PLOS ONE Support for a right-wing populist party and subjective well-being PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0303133 June 26, 2024 8 / 16 26. Torabi MR, Seo D-C. National Study of Behavioral and Life Changes Since September 11. Health Education & Behavior. 2004; 31: 179–192. https://doi.org/10.1177/1090198103259183 PMID: 15090120 27. Bernstein KT, Ahern J, Tracy M, Boscarino JA, Vlahov D, Galea S. 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