Former Social Democratic Partisanship, Working-Class Background, and Support for Right-Wing Populist Parties: A Research Note

Abstract Modern democracies have seen increasing support for populist parties in recent years. One major topic in this research area concerns the roles of individuals with a working-class background and former supporters of social democratic parties in the increasing vote share of right-wing populist parties. In this research note, we study the determinants of support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the 2013 and 2017 Bundestag (German federal) elections. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we show that individuals with a working-class background were more likely to vote for the AfD than for other parties. However, former Social Democratic Party voters and identifiers who had a working-class background were also more likely to support the radical right and anti-immigrant AfD in 2017 over other parties or over non-voting. We do not find similar effects for the 2013 Bundestag election, when the AfD adopted a less extremist, Eurosceptic, and national-conservative profile. Our findings indicate that the German Social Democrats lost previous supporters with a working-class background when a radical right party with an anti-immigrant profile competed for votes. We discuss the implications of these findings for the stability of liberal democracies.