Concern about immigration, not deprivation, is key to predicting support for Germany's far-right party AfD support

Abstract

Is concern about immigration sufficient to account for the increasing success of Germany's right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD)? Or does socio-economic deprivation also matter? Using German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) data from 2014 to 2023, we find that concern about immigration accounts for over 70 percent of explicable variation in AfD support. Previous research has shown that immigration-concern predicts AfD-support. Yet we extend this by arguing that the bivariate relationship between immigration-concern and AfD-support is so strong that deprivation variables neither have much additional explanatory power, nor strongly confound this bivariate relationship between immigration-concern and AfD support. We show how an immigration-unconcerned but deprived "loser of modernization" still only has half the likelihood to support the AfD than an entirely non-deprived "winner of modernization" who is concerned about immigration. These results undermine the much-cited "losers of modernisation hypothesis", not only in the sense that socio-economic conditions may be a weaker explanation than cultural ones, but also by even putting into question whether socio-economic explanations of AfD support have much additional value over cultural explanations at all.