How Health Hurts: Exploring How Subjective Health Appraisal and Healthcare System Appraisal Shape Support for Left- and Right-Wing Populist Parties

What are the political consequences of one’s state of health and their view on their country’s healthcare system? This paper studies how subjective health appraisal and healthcare system appraisal shape support for populist parties, and whether that relationship is conditioned by party ideology. Existing literature already links populist voting to economic insecurity and cultural backlash theories, but personal health remains comparatively underexplored. It is still very much a politically relevant form of vulnerability. This paper addresses this gap by combining individual-level data from waves 7-11 of the European Social Survey (ESS) with party-level information from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES), the Electoral Legacies of War Expert Survey (ELWar) and CHES Israel. Vote choice is modeled across possible party choices, rather than as a binary outcome, using a McFadden choice model. The findings show that poorer subjective health appraisal increases the attractiveness of parties that employ a stronger populist rhetoric. Crucially, this relationship is conditioned by ideology, where poorer subjective health appraisal is associated primarily with greater support for right-wing populist parties. Healthcare system appraisal does not have a significant effect on populist party support. This paper, therefore, argues that health should not be treated merely as a socio-demographic background characteristic, but rather as a form of embodied vulnerability with clear electoral consequences.