Implicit Attitudes, Explicit Attitudes, and the Affinity Towards the AfD

Most electoral studies and, especially, empirical research regarding the question of how voting intentions for the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) can be explained take into account the influence of cultural orientations, but only in the form of explicit attitudes, which are measured by evaluative verbal expressions. Against the background of the dual-process perspective, this paper argues that, in addition to explicit attitudes, implicit attitudes, which represent associative links between mentally represented attitude objects and their evaluation, are not to be neglected in explaining voting intentions for the AfD. According to the principle of catalyzation, implicit attitudes are more strongly reflected in explicit attitudes and also in overt behavior when the articulation of explicit attitudes or behavior takes place in an intuitive rather than a reflected cognitive process. These action-theoretic ideas were tested in an exploratory study with 960 respondents. We found that both implicit and explicit attitudes toward populism and racism influence the intention to vote for the AfD. Also, as predicted by the principle of catalyzation, the influence of implicit attitudes depends on whether respondents are more inclined to intuitive or reflective cognitive processes.