When the US far-right sneezes, the European far-right catches a cold. Quasi-experimental of electoral contagion from Spain

Abstract

Does the electoral defeat of a far-right party abroad influence support for far-right parties at home? By exploiting the quasi-experimental setting provided by the coincidental timing of Donald Trump’s 2020 electoral defeat with the Spanish Sociological Study’s monthly barometer data collection, we provide robust causal evidence to show that far-right’s electoral loss in the US had a negative contagious spillover effect on support for the Spanish far-right. Empirically we estimate treatment effects based on the as good as random exposure to the electoral results, as well as regression discontinuity models to isolate the causal impact of Donald Trump’s electoral defeat on support for Spain’s new far-right party, VOX. Our results - which are robust to various modelling approaches including covariate adjustment, regional fixed effects, placebo issues and nearest-neighbour matching - demonstrate that Trump’s defeat to Joe Biden had a sizeable negative effect on support for VOX. The contagion effect is substantive: equal to 3-5 percentage-points among the general population and 8-11 percentage-points among right-wing voters. Our findings make an important contribution to the broader literature on electoral behaviour as they indicate that the electoral success of ideologically symmetrical parties abroad plays a role in understanding a party's domestic success.