PONE-D-23-23023Voices from the margins: How national narratives are linked to support for populist partiesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Oshri,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not --at this stage-- fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Both reviewers find this paper interesting. Whilst some of the comments are major, a few of them can be considered as minor. So, please note that providing a revision does not necessarily guarantee an acceptance of publication in the next round. Here are a few important points raised by the reviewers:  Both reviewers recommend that there is a need for more emphasis on "nativism" rather than "populism," as the paper deals with right-wing parties. Similarly, both agree that the paper lacks clarity in explaining the generation of national story variables, including whether they are on a continuous scale or categorical. You should also clarify how you classify parties with additional explanation (R1). Important in this conceptual discussion is the point made by R1 regarding the “us versus them” narrative. I think you need to carefully address this concern and make sure that your theoretical approach is solid for the reader.  

Regarding the empirical assessments, you need to provide the rationale for selecting Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US as case studies (R2), as well as explain the inconsistencies across your models (R1). Robustness tests would be appreciated.

Also, note that you need to consider voting for populist parties doesn't necessarily equate to having populist attitudes, and some voters might opt for mainstream parties. This distinction should be acknowledged and relevant work in the field could be referred. In that, try to find out work that focus on populist attitudes as dependent measures in comparison to work that focus on populist party vote choice. 

Please submit your revised manuscript by Nov 25 2023 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Cengiz Erisen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

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Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: (FULL REVIEW UPLOADED AS AN ATTACHMENT)

The paper presents an interesting and potentially novel idea. I personally liked the idea of testing the effect of "narratives" (called here "national stories") on the populist vote, and I think there is much potential in this paper.

However, in the end, these are not adequately explored, and the authors overestimate their contribution. In general, some fundamental flaws make its publication not recommended. Namely, major problems with its research design, theory, and writing require substantial rework and reconsideration. Broadly speaking, these are:

1 – Regarding their research design, the authors propose three research questions but can only answer (and hypothesize on) two.

2 – In their research design and results, the authors argue that there are significant differences in the national stories embraced by voters of PRRPs compared to those of mainstream party supporters (introduction, pages 3-4). According to their findings, individuals who endorse 'boundary national stories' are more inclined to vote for PRRPs. However, it is important to consider the possibility of overfitting if 'boundary national stories' are exclusively associated with an 'us versus them' narrative. If populist parties are the primary proponents of the 'us versus them' discourse, those who align with this idea are more likely to support populist parties.

3 – Still related to their research design, the authors use two questions to gauge "national stories." One is related to past events ("Which past event do you consider to be the most important?"), and the other is related to future events ("What future event do you wish to see?"). The authors claim that the responses to these open-ended questions can be used as proxies for, among others, national stories that are deeply rooted in "in-group favoritism" and "out-group hatred." However, this does not seem to be the case from the examples and results provided in the draft. There is no further explanation or even description of how answers such as "World War 2" can relate to this "us versus them" narrative/feeling.

4 – Theory-wise, the draft is based on concepts such as "populism" and "radical right," since it focuses on "populist radical right parties." However, it does not define either of these concepts.

5 – Data/method-wise, there are many inconsistencies along the draft. A few examples: variables present in some models but absent in others without explanation and variables presented during the text but not used in any of the models.

6 – Also, the authors utilize Laver, Gallagher, and Mair (2011) and the Parlgov to classify the parties as populist (PRRP) or not, but do not provide any further explanation. This becomes problematic when Parlgov does not explain how they classify a party as "populist" or "populist radical right." In this sense, a lack of transparency and reproducibility is concerning.

Reviewer #2: “Voices from the margins: How national narratives are linked to support for populist parties” is an exciting article that measures the impact of national narratives on voting for populist radical right parties or candidates. I thank the authors for their efforts. I present my comments, suggestions, and questions below, which I hope will help the authors (not in order of importance).

1) The authors refer to “national stories” that draw the borders of us versus them populist identities. However, if the authors talk about “national stories” or “national past,” then they focus on right-wing populist parties rather than left-wing ones. Therefore, there should be more discussion about nativism than populism. As Mudde (2007) argues, the populist radical right has three characteristics: nativism, populism, and authoritarianism. Also, it is nativism rather than populism that is the most prominent characteristic of these parties and candidates.

2) The authors did not explain the case selection. There should be at least a few sentences about why the authors examined Denmark, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US.

3) In the introduction (p. 4), the authors referred to the populist constituency as “the bottom of a society’s power structure.” On p. 12, they said that “marginalized people might cope with their subordinate position and at the same time strive to gain greater acceptance to mainstream

society by distancing themselves, physically or psychologically, from other marginalized

groups, and labeling the latter as outsiders and a threat to the community.” In short, the authors refer to the relative deprivation argument in the broadest sense rather than economic grievances. They also used varying sociodemographic variables in interaction models. Thus, it would be better to focus on relative deprivation literature more than losers of globalization. For additional literature, you can check societal pessimism (Steenvoorden & Harteveld, 2018), nostalgic deprivation (Gest et al., 2018), and collective nostalgia (Elçi, 2022).

4) For selecting populist parties, please also check the PopuList dataset (Rooduijn et al., 2023). Nevertheless, it would be better to acknowledge that voting for populist parties is not equal to having populist attitudes. There can be populists who vote for mainstream parties for mechanical and psychological reasons, especially in the UK.

5) The generation of national story variables is not clear. Is it a continuous scale or categorical? However, more importantly, what is the left-out group for stories? The authors used three of them in the same regression without having a multicollinearity issue. Please explain these issues in more detail.

6) Figures 1 a-d should be presented before explaining the results to provide a better picture to the readers. Also, average marginal effects rather than log odds could be reported to understand better and compare the magnitudes of independent variables.

7) The authors used different sociodemographic variables for interaction models. It is not easy to understand why they did not use the same ones in every country. Please explain how the socioeconomic variables were selected.

8) The authors did not explain the sampling and data collection processes. They should add a detailed explanation for each country either to the main text or the appendix.

8) Finally, as a robustness check, the authors could run the regressions without populist attitudes for the other three countries. In fact, they could also remove them from the analysis since they are not using a conventional populism battery.

References

Elçi, E. (2022). Politics of nostalgia and populism: Evidence from Turkey. British Journal of Political Science, 52(2), 697-714.

Gest, J., Reny, T., & Mayer, J. (2018). Roots of the radical right: Nostalgic deprivation in the United States and Britain. Comparative Political Studies, 51(13), 1694-1719.

Mudde, C. (2007). Populist radical right parties in Europe. Cambridge University Press.

Rooduijn, M., Pirro, A. L., Halikiopoulou, D., Froio, C., Van Kessel, S., De Lange, S. L., ... & Taggart, P. (2023). The PopuList: A database of populist, far-left, and far-right parties using expert-informed qualitative comparative classification (EiQCC). British Journal of Political Science, 1-10.

Steenvoorden, E., & Harteveld, E. (2018). The appeal of nostalgia: The influence of societal pessimism on support for populist radical right parties. West European Politics, 41(1), 28-52.

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Eduardo Ryo Tamaki

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PLOS ONE (2023) Review.docx

PONE-D-23-23023R1Voices from the margins: How national narratives are linked with support for populist radical right partiesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Oshri,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. As R2 is satisfied with the revision, it appears that you accidentally omitted R1's previous review as it was an attachment to the email. You can now access both reviews provided by R1. I urge you to carefully read them and address each comment in detail. Also, given the comparative nature of your work, I recommend that you check out the related work published on populism in the field of political psychology.       

Please submit your revised manuscript by Mar 08 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Cengiz Erisen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I appreciate the effort and the changes made by the authors. Personally, I liked how the authors handled some of the comments regarding their research question, and I found that the changes improved heavily on the original manuscript. However, the third and fourth points remain problematic, and many (if not all) minor comments were left unaddressed. Since I believe this might be due to some problem that prevented them from accessing the file attached to the original review or maybe even an oversight, I recommend another round of revisions. I am attaching my original comments again.

Here are some other comments based on this round:

1) Related to the research design, I am still not convinced about how the questions used for both past and future events can be used as proxies for national stories “deeply rooted in in-group favoritism and out-group hatred.” Even though the authors addressed this comment in their response, I am still unconvinced.

a. “Boundary national stories establish a division between “the people,” or the national community – “us” and everyone outside it – “them.” These stories inherently position other nations as out-groups, emphasizing a separation between them and the in-group (the nation).” This type of story seems to be related to only nationalism. Both “national community” (treated as “us”) and “everyone outside it” (treated as “them”) seem to measure nationalism, as there is no reference to “elites” or the moral division between them and “the people,” or “us.” In this sense, if the authors are studying PRRPs (Populist Radical Right Parties), they will indeed find a relationship between “boundary national stories” and support for this party family. However, this connection will be driven mainly by nationalism and not populism.

b. How would “Napoleonic wars” and “Industrial revolution” (as past events) gauge a “survival story”? Given how long it has been since both events, can you confidently affirm that they still provoke sentiments related to economic and physical securities? I do not think this is the case.

c. How would “World War 2” mark the “separation from other nations”?

d. Finally, do the terms “survival” and “self-expression” come from studies in political culture? They seem to resemble Inglehart’s definitions heavily. If that is the case, why not acknowledge that?

2) There is still a problem with the concepts. My original comment was that the manuscript lacked a proper definition of concepts such as “populism” and “radical right” (consequently, “populist radical right”). The authors responded by adding a couple of phrases to the introduction and section 3. However, I do not think this is enough.

a. First, there is still no proper definition of populism.

b. Second, even though they added a couple of phrases in section 3, there needs to be a connection between “national stories” and “(radical right) populism.” What I mean by that is that the authors should properly connect these two things, developing how we should expect national stories to relate and connect to radical right populism.

c. Third, I would suggest caution when writing that “These studies point at populist actors’ tendency to see the world in terms of us-versus-them dichotomies, be it “the people” versus the “corrupt elite” or negative sentiments toward out-groups” (p. 11). Since populism requires anti-elitism, this sentence might be misleading.

d. Finally, I suggest splitting this paragraph (p. 11) into smaller parts.

3) When talking about the three types of stories, the authors state that “while the first two kind (survival and self-expression) encapsulate the norms, goals, and values of the national group, the Boundary story defines the national community relationally and negatively, in terms of exclusion.”

a. First, are the classifications of stories on “survival,” “self-expression,” and “us versus them boundary” mutually exclusive? Can boundary’s (us versus them) exclusion also be done through values and norms? Moreover, in this sense, would it still be “boundary” or something different?

b. Second, how can “survival” and “self-expression” expressed in stories relate to both material and economic survival (or freedom and emancipation) and “norms, goals, and values” at the same time? An example: how can “Napoleonic wars” relate to survival, in terms of material and economic security, and “norms, goals, and values of the national group” simultaneously? This seems to be stretching or reading in too much.

4) Have the authors tried using “stories” as moderators/mediators in their models? Although I am not entirely convinced yet of the importance of “stories” as predictors for support for Populist Radical Right parties, I think it makes sense to think of them as either moderators or mediators (depending on the authors’ theories and points of view).

5) Finally, I would suggest removing the variable “populist attitudes” from the models. First and most importantly, these variables (Appendix D) do not measure populist attitudes. While items 1 to 3 could be used, to some extent, items 4 to 8 measure different things, among which political efficacy (which has been commonly mistaken or even incorrectly used as a proxy for populist attitudes). Second, there is no further information on how the scale was created. If the authors plan on keeping these variables as a measure of populist attitudes, I would recommend (1) calling it something different, (2) displaying the result of an EFA or a CFA (depending on whether this scale was used before), and (3) explaining how the variables were aggregated, or how they come together to form a scale.

The rest of my initial comments are attached.

Reviewer #2: I congratulate the authors for putting enormous effort into replying to my comments and suggestions and revising the manuscript accordingly. I think the manuscript is ready for publication. I have one minor suggestion about Figure 2's presentation. While the note section indicates, "The boundary, survival, and self-expression are three scales for the three national story types," the graph is labeled as "us/them, survival, self-expression." It would be better to consistently use boundary or us/them throughout the manuscript.

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Attachments

Attachment

Submitted filename: PLOS ONE (R&R) (2024) Review.docx

PONE-D-23-23023R2Voices from the margins: How national stories are linked with support for populist radical right partiesPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Oshri,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a final round of revisions to the manuscript that address the points raised during the review process. The reviewer raises a number of important points that you will need to pay careful attention in the revisions. These comments are to-the-point and quite constructive, improving the manuscript's methodology and substantive contribution to the literature. While doing the revision, I also ask that you browse the literature in political science tackling far-right vote choice from different perspectives across Europe and the UK. Those would be particularly useful in extending the content of your work.  Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 16 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
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• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Cengiz Erisen

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

**********

2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

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Reviewer #1: I would like to start by thanking the authors for the effort put into addressing each one of my previous comments. Not only were they meticulous in their responses, but they also covered all of the points I initially raised. I recognize the effort and time put into this, so I appreciate and congratulate them. With a few exceptions, I think all of my concerns were satisfactorily covered, and I am very satisfied with the answers provided by the authors. There are only a couple of things I would like to highlight (below). Other than that, I'm happy to recommend its publication.

First, some suggestions:

The authors' answer to comment 1.09 should be added to the paper. Even if as a footnote, an explanation of how the same event can have multiple categorizations (in the case of WW2, all three dimensions) is of great importance for the reader to properly understand the method used in the paper.

a. In the same note, if the example given by the authors, WW2 + Peace future event can receive a "1" for all three dimensions, would it then be counted as simultaneously all these three categories?

Comment 1.10: I believe that this was actually my mistake when writing the comment. What I meant is, how can a single story be related to both "survival" and "self-expression" if these two are diametrically opposed?

Comment 1.12: I'd like to see, if possible, a scree plot and a parallel test for the EFA the authors mentioned. In this case, if both tests point to alternatives with 1 or more factors, I'd like the authors to test the different alternatives. I suggest comparing them using chi-squared goodness-of-fit statistics and fit indices such as RMSEA, SRMR, and TLI. While I believe that it is possible for these items to load on the same dimension, I think it is important to highlight that Factor Analysis should always be used together with a solid theoretical base. In this case, even though the political efficacy question might load together with the other items (supposing the 1 factor solution is preferred over other alternatives), theory-wise, it is not populism.

Finally, two other comments that I think are relevant but have no impact on my final decision (as I explain below):

When answering point 1.2, the authors write:

“We appreciate the reviewer's in-depth consideration of the national story construct and its definition. In response to this comment, we have provided further elaboration on our classification logic in the revised manuscript (see pages 17-19). The classification of past and future events (story components) like the "Napoleonic Wars" and the "Industrial Revolution" as belonging to the "Survival" category is based on their inclusion of economic or conflict-related elements.

It is important to note that our classification pertains to the stories themselves, not the individuals holding them. We use a ‘text-oriented’ approach to reading the text rather than ‘author-oriented’ since we cannot determine the individual intentions of every respondent. While such reading of the text has its pros and cons, it makes sense to assume that if a person orients her national stories around survival-related content (e.g. economic or conflict-related elements), even historical ones, it suggests a priority or at least an attention to survival framing, in comparison with respondents who chose events relating to, say, women's rights. Additionally, we should keep in mind that past events are but one component of our proxy for national story, and a "full" survival story must also involve an event related to survival in the future.

We believe that future research could advance the understanding, definition, and measurement of national stories. Despite this limitation, our study aligns with previous empirical endeavors aimed at assessing people's national stories through surveys, which is made more explicit in this version. We acknowledge the trade-off inherent in our approach: while we benefit from a broad dataset encompassing a representative sample of respondents across different countries, our main independent variable, the national story construct, is defined and measured thinly. Our operational definition, using a sequence of past and future events to represent the national story, is but one approach, and we anticipate that future studies will refine and expand upon this strategy (see our discussion section). Nonetheless, our research stands as the first, to our knowledge, to establish a link between national stories and the vote for PRRPs, and we hope to see further exploration in this area.”

Although I appreciate their answer, I fear that I'm still not convinced. As far as I'm concerned, the authors have not convinced me that references to past (and even future) events such as the "Napoleonic Wars" and the "Industrial Revolution" can be classified as "survival" based on the "feelings of economic and physical securities" they elicit. The authors state that “while such reading of the text has its pros and cons, it makes sense to assume that if a person orients her national stories around survival-related content (e.g. economic or conflict-related elements), even historical ones, it suggests a priority or at least an attention to survival framing, in comparison with respondents who chose events relating to, say, women's rights." While I agree with the overall logic, I fail to grasp how these events represent an individual who "orients themselves around survival-related content." This explanation, to me, is one of the most important things missing in this paper.

Regarding comment 1.3, the authors write:

"Following this comment our revised manuscript underscores that conflicts and wars inherently establish boundaries between at least two opposing groups. Therefore, story components containing WW2 as a past event include boundary elements of “us versus them."

Again, I appreciate the authors' answer and the effort made in clarifying this point. However, I'm still not entirely sure about this. In the example I gave about WW2, I believe that the mere reference to "WW2" can elicit feelings that go beyond the boundaries of at least two opposing groups. Historical events of this magnitude can elicit not only "us versus them" feelings, but also many others related to things such as fear, loss, pride, shame, etc. Not all of them are necessarily tied to a "us versus them" divide. However, at this point, I believe these are limitations I personally have with the topic of the paper and not something that necessarily pertains to its quality or suitability for publication. While it does not influence my final decision, I think it's something worth mentioning.

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Reviewer #1: No

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Voices from the margins: How national stories are linked with support for populist radical right parties

PONE-D-23-23023R3

Dear Dr. Oshri,

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