Populism and the center-periphery cleavage. The case of the AfD

The support for populist radical right (PRR) parties has been on the rise over recent decades and has dramatically transformed the political landscape of Western European political systems. Not surprisingly, their emergence and electoral success has motivated a considerable amount of scholarly research. Most of the literature on the PRR, however, focuses on the national and supranational political levels, leaving the subnational level highly unexplored. This paper fills that literature gap by exploring the electoral strategies of PRR parties in substate elections and along the territorial dimension of political competition. To do so, we compare the political discourse of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) across German Länder since its first regional electoral success in 2014 until 2021. Unlike other authors who have focused on single cases or small-n comparisons using more qualitative approaches, we analyse party offer across a greater number of regions using quantitative content analysis data from the Regional Manifestos Project. Our main argument is that PRR parties adapt to the multi-level structure of the state and make electoral use of centre-periphery issues to find a niche for themselves. Preliminary empirical findings support our main hypothesis, showing evidence of AfD’s party manifesto heterogeneity in the centre-periphery dimension across German states. This article contributes to advance research in the area in different ways. First, theoretically we connect the study of the PRR with the literature on state-wide parties’ competition along the centre-periphery conflict providing a nuanced theoretical account. Second, the use of content-analytical data opens up a more ambitious avenue for comparative empirical research. Finally, as we are testing our arguments in a least case scenario – Germany – our paper’s findings pave the way for hypothesis testing in countries with asymmetrical decentralization and strong regionalism.