Can Grassroots Organizations Reduce Support for Right-Wing Populism via Social Media?
The rise of right-wing populism throughout Western democracies coincided with an increasing adoption of social media – both among supporters and opponents of right-wing populism alike. In light of these trends, we assess whether grassroots organizations are effective in combating right-wing populism via social media. We study this question using a tightly controlled online field experiment embedded in the Facebook campaign of a German grassroots organization. Leveraging geo-spatial variation in where the organization disseminated its Facebook ads targeting Germany's leading right-wing populist party (AfD), we find that the campaign did not significantly affect the AfD's vote share and turnout. Drawing on data from a complementary online experiment, we show that insufficient outreach on Facebook together with the absence of individual-level responses of attitudes and behavior explains why the campaign did not meaningfully shape aggregate election outcomes.
Year of publication: |
2023
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Authors: | Wimmer, Johannes ; Vollmer, Leonhard |
Publisher: |
München und Berlin : Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition |
Saved in:
freely available
Series: | Discussion Paper ; 390 |
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Type of publication: | Book / Working Paper |
Type of publication (narrower categories): | Working Paper |
Language: | English |
Other identifiers: | 188206366X [GVK] hdl:10419/282082 [Handle] RePEc:rco:dpaper:390 [RePEc] |
Source: |
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10014467721
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