Gattermann, K., van den Hoogen, E., & de Vreese, C. (2026). The role of far-right party performance in shaping disinformation concerns of European voters: evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections. Journal of European Public Policy, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/13501763.2025.2489088
Summary
This paper examines how the electoral success of far-right parties in the 2024 European Parliament elections shaped European voters’ concerns about disinformation. Moving beyond individual-level predispositions, the authors argue that the electoral context itself — specifically how well far-right parties performed in a given country — helps explain variation in how worried citizens are about the integrity of the information environment. Situated at the intersection of European elections research, far-right party studies, and political communication scholarship on disinformation, the study offers empirical evidence from a recent, politically salient case to illuminate the contextual drivers of citizen perceptions of information integrity.
Key Contributions
- Connects research on far-right party success with research on public perceptions of disinformation in the European context.
- Provides empirical evidence from the 2024 EP elections, a recent and highly salient case, on contextual drivers of disinformation concern.
- Advances understanding of how electoral outcomes can shape citizens’ attitudes toward information ecosystems in the EU.
- Highlights that electoral context — not only individual-level factors — matters for how threats to information integrity are perceived.
Methods
- Empirical analysis drawing on data situated in the 2024 European Parliament elections context.
- Cross-national comparison across EU member states, linking country-level far-right electoral outcomes to voter-level concerns about disinformation.
Findings
- Variation in far-right electoral performance across countries is associated with variation in voters’ disinformation concerns.
- Electoral context influences perceived threat of disinformation, over and above individual predispositions. (Specific direction and magnitude of the effect are not recoverable from the abstract alone.)
Connections
This paper’s focus on European far-right politics and its interaction with information integrity connects it to work on disinformation resilience and concern in European democracies, such as Humprecht2025-ml, and to studies of populist and mis/disinformation dynamics like Hameleers2026-mc. Its cross-national electoral framing also relates to broader European political communication and election-context research, including Van_Erkel2026-mk.