Mainstream Voters, Non-Voters and Populist Voters: What Sets Them Apart?
Abstract
Three different constituencies are becoming increasingly common across Western European electorates: mainstream voters, non-voters and populist voters. Despite their distinct behaviours in electoral politics, we have limited empirical knowledge about the characteristics that distinguish these three groups, given the typical underrepresentation of non-voters in surveys and the relative recency of large-scale research on populist voters. To address this gap, we analyse novel survey data from contemporary Germany that oversamples non-voters and includes a sizeable share of both populist radical left and populist radical right party supporters. Two main findings with broader implications stand out. First, populist voters resemble their mainstream counterparts in their expectations about democracy but correspond more closely to non-voters regarding (dis-)satisfaction with democracy. Second, non-voters and populist voters seem to reject mainstream democratic politics in distinct ways, throwing doubt on the (further) mobilization potential of abstainers for populist projects.
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Biographies
Cédric M Koch is a Research Fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Center’s Global Governance Unit and a Doctoral Researcher at the Free University of Berlin and the Berlin Graduate School for Global and Transregional Studies.
Carlos Meléndez is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES) and Associate Researcher at Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias Sociales – Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile.
Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser is Professor of Political Science at Universidad Diego Portales in Santiago de Chile and Associate Researcher at COES. He is the co-author, with Cas Mudde, of Populism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2017) as well as the co-editor, with Tim Bale, of Riding the Populist Wave: Europe’s Mainstream Right in Crisis (Cambridge University Press, 2021).
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