Is There a Populist Identity in Germany? Evidence from a Representative Survey

The “Alternative for Germany” (Alternative für Deutschland; AfD) has been described as a right-wing populist party in Germany (Arzheimer 2015). Originally founded as a single issue party with the aim of abolishing the Euro currency in Germany, the party gained increasing support among a xenophobic electoral base in 2013 and 2014 elections (Schmitt-Beck 2017). On the other pole of the electoral array, the Left Party (Die Linke) has been called left-wing populist due to its emergence from the successor party of the Socialist Unity Party of West Germany (Sozialistische Einheitspartei, SED) (Zaslove 2008). Both parties have gained electoral support when comparing the recent general election in 2017 to the 2013 general election in Germany. While analyses of each party’s supporters regarding political preferences already exist (Berbuir, Lewandowsky, and Siri 2015), analyses of the commonalities that supporters of these populist parties share are rare. Consequently, the question emerges whether there exists a populist identity in Germany, which is either captured by the two mentioned populist parties or not yet captured by any party. To answer this question, we have conducted a representative survey in cooperation with YouGov and gathered evidence on party identification and party votes in Germany as well as specific political and issue preferences. The proposed paper therefore analyses individual party identification of AfD and Linke and compares it with individual preferences. Furthermore, it investigates the social identity of those not feeling close to a certain party and seeks to reveal the shared characteristics of this social group (Hornung, Bandelow, and Vogeler 2018).