Alexia Katsanidou & Ann-Kathrin Reinl (2020) Populists in Government: Voter Defection and Party Resilience, Representation, DOI: 10.1080/00344893.2019.1700153
Populist parties in government show high levels of resilience despite their policy failures. The inevitable reality check and the failure of populist parties to implement their proposed policies do not seem to harm them electorally. Using crisis-driven Greece as an example, we use data from the period shortly after the September 2015 election. We find that voter defection more often happens when voters do not believe their party fought for them and less often when voters' positions are incongruent with the policies that are actually implemented.