A growing literature suggests that individuals’ populist attitudes are key drivers of voting for both left-wing and right-wing populist parties. However, in contrast to these observational studies, results from recent conjoint experiments suggest that the effect of ‘thin’ populist attitudes (e.g. support for referendums, distrust of elites) is overstated and that populist forces’ ‘host’ ideology (e.g. their anti-immigration or anti-globalisation positions) drive support. Turning to the case of Germany, featuring both electorally successful left-wing and right-wing populist parties, we thus reevaluate why voters support these parties. We use a new method that allows us to estimate individual-level, revealed preferences from people’s choices in conjoint experiments, which allows us to compare the effects of expressed attitudes measured through standard survey scales to revealed preferences measured from conjoint tasks. Results show that support for the populist Alternative für Deutschland and Die Linke is not driven by voters’ revealed thin populist preferences but rather by revealed issue preferences. Both parties primarily benefit from their distinct policy positions rather than their ‘thin’ populist ideology.
