Through Thick but not through Thin - The (Ir)relevance of Populist Rhetoric in Accommodating a Populist Radical Right Challenger

Previous work attributes the success of populist challenger parties to a combination of extreme policy positions and populist rhetoric. Scholars have thus asked whether mainstream parties should accommodate their challengers by adopting more extreme positions themselves. However, how mainstream parties can respond to the rhetorical dimension of such challenges and whether they would benefit from talking populist themselves is hitherto unknown. I conduct a pre-registered vignette survey experiment in Germany (n = 4,000), randomizing the use of populist rhetoric and radical policy positions to understand how voters react when mainstream parties engage in populist rhetoric and/or adopt extreme positions. The results show that voters' party preferences are strongly influenced by the policy positions that mainstream parties adopt but not by the type of rhetoric they engage in. Voters reward or penalise mainstream parties conditional on the alignment between the party's position and their own issue preferences. Whether mainstream parties engage in populist rhetoric does not affect voters' evaluation of a mainstream party though. These results bear good news for democracy: Most voters are not fooled by the seemingly simple worldview that populist rhetoric offers and penalise mainstream parties when these adopt extreme positions.