Values, Taboos, and Votes: How Basic Human Values Affect Populist Electoral Support

Abstract

How do individuals' underlying value orientations affect populist voting? Building on the congruency model in social psychology, we theorize that voters holding nonconformist values feel closest to political actors who employ a taboo-breaking populist style in the political debate. Moreover, we hypothesize that security and universalism values feed into vote choices between right-wing and left-wing parties. Leveraging structural equation modeling (SEM) and data from the 2017 German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we find that non-conformist values predict voting for the populist far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD), but not for the left-wing populist The Left. Further, security and universalism values are associated with a higher probability of voting for not only populist but also mainstream parties. These findings point to the underlying role of basic human values in electoral support for populist parties and political behavior in general. Zusammenfassung Wie beeinfussen grundlegende individuelle Wertorientierungen das Wählen populistischer Parteien? Aufbauend auf dem sozialpsychologischen Kongruenzmodell argumentieren wir, dass sich Wähler*innen mit nonkonformistischen Wertorientierungen politischen Akteuren am nähesten fühlen, die sich durch einen tabubrechenden politischen Stil in der öffentlichen Debatte auszeichnen. Darüber hinaus nehmen

Why do people give to their governments? Lab‐in‐the‐field evidence on the role of norms, social information, and political support

“…We are interested in how perceived social norms (beliefs about the average donation of others), descriptive social information (the real information provided regarding the average donation of their reference group), and political support and quality of government affect giving to the government. Our research is informed by literature on political behavior, norms, and experiments on donations to charities and government (Cialdini et al, 1990;Bicchieri, 2005;Li et al, 2011Li et al, , 2015Hellmüller et al, 2020;Ozdemir & Jacob, 2022).…”