Research on the normalization of radical populist parties often leads us to think that the latter have now cemented their voting base. This article contributes to such research by examining the relationships between populist attitudes and voting preferences in the French 2022 presidential election. By operationalizing the empirical data in a new fashion, it shall first demonstrate that individuals who have adopted populist attitudes display exclusive voting probabilities that remain stable over time, preferring Jean-Luc Mélenchon on one side of the spectrum and Marine Le Pen on the other. Next, this article shall show that both populist camps are characterized by strong continuity between voting probabilities and real votes, and between the two presidential elections in 2017 and 2022 respectively. These results corroborate the argument that the establishment of populist parties and their issues in the political discourse has stabilized and aligned populist voting patterns.
- populism
- electoral mobility
- party identification
- voting probabilities
- latent class analysis