The Normalization of the-Right: When the Salience of Victories Matters

Far-right voting is stigmatized, yet rising worldwide. Do signals of its newfound popularity embolden voters to support the far-right, even in the secrecy of the voting booth? French two-round elections provide a natural experiment to answer this question. When far-right candidates narrowly rank first in round one—a salient but purely symbolic victory—this brings them more votes in round two, held merely one week later. At its peak, this effect explains 88% of far-right round two victories in narrowly treated districts. Evidence aligns with voters attending more to salient signals when they update second-order beliefs about the far-right’s acceptability. As predicted if voters attach greater weight to more salient signals, more unusual wins have larger effects. Leveraging a large corpus of newspaper articles I scraped, I further show that these unusual wins trigger a spike in media coverage. Consistent with stigma erosion, the vote effect is specific to the far-right, larger where stigma is likely stronger, and persists in the long-term. Using administrative records on campaign funding, I document similar patterns for campaign donations—acts of support that are less secret than votes and may therefore carry larger reputational costs. Lastly, I show that these wins normalized the open expression of anti-immigration views.