East Germany: another party landscape

Abstract

Despite the large scale implementation of the West German political order, and more than ten years after unification, the East German party system still shows several peculiarities. These are the composition of the party systems in the East German Länder, voting patterns, but also processes of regionalisation within East Germany. Analysing the parties' different success stories in the East German Länder on the different electoral levels helps us to understand the quality of and reasons for their success and to answer questions about the importance of traditional voting patterns against possible new bases for the loyalities in a post-socialist environment.