How Health Hurts: Exploring How Personal Health And Economic Insecurity Shape Support for Left- And Right-Wing Populist Parties

What impact do personal health and economic insecurity have on citizens’ backing of populist parties? How do these two vulnerabilities determine the ideological direction of populist support? Although substantial research has shown a clear link between populist voting and economic hardship or cultural grievances, significantly less attention has been paid to personal health as a politically relevant factor of individual vulnerability. This paper addresses this gap through a cross-national empirical study that zeroes in on the political consequences of people’s health. It does so by combining individual-level data from waves 7-11 of the European Social Survey (ESS) with party-level information gathered in the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), the Electoral Legacies of War Expert Survey (ELWar) and the Global Party Survey (GPS), which together provide detailed measures of parties’ populism, left-right, economic and GAL-TAN positions. The paper estimates different multilevel logistic regression models that explain voter choice. The main findings indicate that poorer health leads people away from left-wing populist parties, but is positively correlated with a higher propensity to vote for right-wing populist parties. The central argument proposed in the paper thus stands as follows: Health exists not only as a background socio-democratic characteristic, but also as a politically salient dimension of insecurity that interacts with economic difficulties and party supply.