Why Do Populists Cluster Regionally? Individual and Contextual Drivers of Populist Attitudes and Vote Choices in Germany and Czechia

Populist parties have been on the rise across Europe, but their electoral support is strikingly uneven across different regions. This paper seeks to shed more light on the reasons for this phenomenon. We start from the assumption that populism has both individual-level and contextual drivers. We view populist attitudes as a latent trait that can be relatively widespread. Additional conditions are required to turn an individual with populist attitudes into a voter of a populist party. We argue that living in a region marked by economic and demographic decline is one such additional condition that may transform latent attitudes into manifest vote choices. We demonstrate the empirical relevance of our argument using a unique dataset combining comparable items from two representative surveys covering Germany (N = 2,112) and the Czech Republic (N = 1,000) with economic, demographic, ethnic, and religious characteristics of relevant regional contexts in both countries (167 constituencies in Germany and 77 districts in the Czech Republic). Using multilevel regression models, the paper shows that individual-level characteristics alone drive populist attitudes. Populist vote choice, in contrast, is influenced by both individual and contextual factors. These findings have important implications for the literature on the ideational approach to populism, on the electoral support base of populist parties, and on electoral politics in general.