How To Treat Populists: Elite Conflict and Changes in European Parties’ Vote Share

Does attacking populists help or hurt parties come election day? While a growing literature finds that conflict between populist and mainstream parties is a major driver of affective polarization, and that this divide exists at both the mass and elite levels, no work has been done thus far examining whether the attacks mainstream elites level against their populist opponents actually persuade voters to support them over the populists. We test the effect of anti-populist rhetoric using both large-n observational data and a survey experiment. Using event data from the Integrated Crisis Early Warning Dataset covering 13 European democracies we show that parties who behaved more conflictually towards populists in the run up to elections saw their vote shares' decrease relative to the previous election. We show that this effect is entirely driven by incumbent parties. We also find suggestive evidence that attacks on populist parties in the run up to elections actually serve to increase their vote shares relative to the last election. Preliminary analysis of a survey experiment conducted on German voters in the run up to the 2025 election suggest a similar pattern. CDU respondents became less likely to vote for their own party, and more likely to vote for the AFD after being exposed to a rhetorical attack from their party leader towards the AfD. This research suggests that parties and politicians interested in countering populism's rise should find other strategies.