When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental evidence of electoral contagion from Spain
When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental evidence of electoral contagion from Spain
Does the electoral defeat of a far-right party abroad influence support for similar parties at home? In this paper we posit, and test, the theoretical argument that signals of viability and popularity akin to bandwagon and titanic effects operate beyond the confines of national boundaries to cause voters to update domestic preferences based on comparable party performance abroad. By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of Donald Trump's 2020 electoral defeat with the Spanish sociological study's monthly barometer data collection, we provide robust causal evidence to show that Trump's electoral loss in the US had a negative contagious spillover effect on self-reported support for the Spanish far-right. Empirically we estimate intent-to-treat effects based on the as good as random exposure to the electoral results to isolate the impact of Trump's defeat on the voting intentions for Spain's new far-right party, VOX. Our results - which are robust to various modelling approaches including covariate adjustment, regional fixed effects, placebo issues, and nearest-neighbour matching - demonstrate that Trump's defeat to Joe Biden had a sizeable negative effect on expressed support for VOX. The contagion effect is substantive: equal to 3 to 6 percentage-points among the general population and 11 percentage-points among former right-wing voters. Our findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on electoral behaviour as they indicate that the electoral success of ideologically symmetrical parties abroad can play a role in understanding a party's domestic success by serving as an important information signal of these parties' electoral viability.
Contagion effects, Electoral spillovers, Far-right, Quasi-experiment, Spain, Trump, VOX
Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.
e25c6280-842c-407f-a961-6472eea5d845
Rama, José
6997178d-0645-4e6a-9f91-fe39e711a9fa
April 2022
Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J.
e25c6280-842c-407f-a961-6472eea5d845
Rama, José
6997178d-0645-4e6a-9f91-fe39e711a9fa
Turnbull-Dugarte, Stuart J. and Rama, José
(2022)
When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental evidence of electoral contagion from Spain.
Electoral Studies, 76, [102443].
(doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2022.102443).
Abstract
Does the electoral defeat of a far-right party abroad influence support for similar parties at home? In this paper we posit, and test, the theoretical argument that signals of viability and popularity akin to bandwagon and titanic effects operate beyond the confines of national boundaries to cause voters to update domestic preferences based on comparable party performance abroad. By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of Donald Trump's 2020 electoral defeat with the Spanish sociological study's monthly barometer data collection, we provide robust causal evidence to show that Trump's electoral loss in the US had a negative contagious spillover effect on self-reported support for the Spanish far-right. Empirically we estimate intent-to-treat effects based on the as good as random exposure to the electoral results to isolate the impact of Trump's defeat on the voting intentions for Spain's new far-right party, VOX. Our results - which are robust to various modelling approaches including covariate adjustment, regional fixed effects, placebo issues, and nearest-neighbour matching - demonstrate that Trump's defeat to Joe Biden had a sizeable negative effect on expressed support for VOX. The contagion effect is substantive: equal to 3 to 6 percentage-points among the general population and 11 percentage-points among former right-wing voters. Our findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on electoral behaviour as they indicate that the electoral success of ideologically symmetrical parties abroad can play a role in understanding a party's domestic success by serving as an important information signal of these parties' electoral viability.
Text
VoxTrump_accpted
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 18 January 2022
e-pub ahead of print date: 28 January 2022
Published date: April 2022
Additional Information:
Funding Information:
We are very grateful to Daniel Devine, Joshua Townsley, Will Jennings, and Erik Gahner Larsen for their feedback on earlier iterations of this paper. We would also like to thank the three anonymous reviewers and the associate editor for their insightful, and critical, comments on earlier iterations of the manuscript.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 Elsevier Ltd
Copyright:
Copyright 2022 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
Keywords:
Contagion effects, Electoral spillovers, Far-right, Quasi-experiment, Spain, Trump, VOX
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 454683
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/454683
ISSN: 0261-3794
PURE UUID: a6324b4a-9a05-4b98-8b1d-78b4b57579d2
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Date deposited: 21 Feb 2022 17:34
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 07:06
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Author:
José Rama
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