The role of far-right party performance in shaping disinformation concerns of European voters: evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections

Summary

This paper examines whether the electoral performance of far-right parties in the 2024 European Parliament elections shaped how European voters perceive disinformation as a threat. Moving beyond individual-level predictors of disinformation concern, the authors leverage cross-national variation in far-right vote shares across EU member states to argue that the electoral context itself conditions citizens’ worry about information integrity. The study thus situates disinformation concern as not only a psychological or media-use phenomenon, but also a politically contingent attitude tied to the visible success of parties associated with contested information practices.

Key Contributions

• Bridges the literatures on far-right party success and public perceptions of disinformation in a unified European framework.
• Provides timely empirical evidence from the 2024 European Parliament elections, a high-salience pan-European case.
• Establishes electoral outcomes as a contextual-level driver of citizens’ attitudes toward the information ecosystem, complementing individual-level accounts.

Methods

The study uses cross-national empirical analysis tied to the 2024 EP elections, linking country-level far-right electoral performance to survey-based measures of voter concern about disinformation across EU member states. The comparative design allows the authors to isolate contextual effects from individual predispositions.

Findings

• Variation in far-right electoral performance across EU countries corresponds to variation in voter concern about disinformation.
• Electoral context matters: country-level political outcomes, not just individual characteristics, shape how citizens perceive disinformation threats.
• The pattern reinforces the idea that disinformation concern is politically situated and responsive to the visibility and success of contested political actors.

Connections

This paper speaks directly to work mapping cross-national patterns of disinformation perception and resilience in Europe, such as Humprecht2025-ml, and to research on how populist and far-right communication ecosystems shape information environments, including Frischlich2025-vn and Hameleers2026-mc. It also complements studies of partisan asymmetries in disinformation exposure and concern like Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq and Budak2024-ef, extending those debates to the question of how electoral outcomes themselves feed back into public attitudes about information integrity.