Right-Wing Populism or Right-Wing Disenchantment?: An Empirical Analysis of the Support for the AfD in the Run-Up to the 2017 Bundestag Elections.

Abstract

The support for the Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the run-up to the 2017 Bundestag elections is analysed with reference to the state of research on older right-wing parties in Germany. Based on an analysis of the pre-election cross-sectional study of the German National Election Study (GLES), it can be shown that AfD is also primarily supported by people who are ideologically right-wing and at the same time disenchanted with politics. A distinctive feature of the AfD, however, in comparison to the older right-wing parties, is that it also succeeds in mobilising significant proportions of the political disenchanted from the political centre and the moderate leftist camp. Due to the methodological problems in identifying interaction effects in the context of logistic regression analyses, the empirical analyses are carried out with the CHAID segmentation algorithm. Furthermore, it is shown that the concept of right-wing populism has inconsistencies in content and does not generate any additional explanatory power in the empirical analysis of support for AfD. Finally, the special importance of Angela Merkel for the emergence of political disenchantment and thus also for the support of the AfD is being elaborated.