The Campaign and its Dynamics at the 2005 German General Election

Abstract

The 2005 election was preceded by one of the most intense and turbulent campaigns in recent German political history. This article describes the main parties' campaign strategies. According to opinion polls published prior to the election, a victory of the oppositional CDU/CSU and FDP seemed to be a foregone conclusion for much of the campaign. The SPD was forced to fight a political battle on two fronts – against the Christian Democrats and Liberals on the one hand and the newly founded Leftist Party on the other. In its campaign, the SPD took a decisive step to the left, highlighting issues of welfare and social justice. It fiercely attacked the reforms proposed by CDU/CSU and FDP and was rewarded by its core electorate at the polls. The CDU/CSU's and FDP's platform of liberal reforms, by contrast, was at odds with the preferences of the majority of voters and made it difficult for the Christian Democrats to maintain its high level of mobilisation. In the end, therefore, the SPD managed to remobilise enough former supporters and emerged from the election almost on par with the CDU/CSU. Even at its very end, the 2005 campaign saw considerable dynamics. Partly in response to the FDP's and the Greens' aggressive second-vote campaigns and partly as a signal against first indications of a possible ‘Grand Coalition’ of the two major parties after the election, substantial numbers of voters moved from the two major parties to one of their smaller likely coalition partners (FDP and Greens).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We are indebted to Melanie Diermann, Sebastian Holler and Ansgar Wolsing for their assistance in preparing this paper.

Notes

1. See http://www.wahlen.lds.nrw.de/landtagswahlen/2005/lwahl/a000lw0500.html (accessed 23 February, 2006) for details of the election result.

2. Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer and his party, the Greens, were not happy with Schröder's and Müntefering's plan. However, apparently no one had bothered asking them for their consent, and once the plan had been made public they had little choice but to go along (cf. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, ‘Professionalisierung mit Verspätung und knappem Budget: Bündnis 90/Die Grünen im Wahlkampf’, in Axel Balzer, Marvin Geilich, Anna Pfletschinger, and Shamin Rafat (eds), Politik als Marke: Politikvermittlung zwischen Kommunikation und Inszenierung (Münster: Lit, 2005), pp.202–15). Whether the SPD leaders still were so much convinced of the wisdom of their move after the immediate drop of the SPD in the polls will probably remain a secret forever. All other parties had every reason to believe that an early election could only be to their advantage.

3. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, ‘Ein Sieg der “Kampa”? Politische Symbolik im Wahlkampf der SPD und ihre Resonanz in der Wählerschaft’, in Hans-Dieter Klingemann and Max Kaase (eds), Wahlen und Wähler. Analysen aus Anlass der Bundestagswahl 1998 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2001), pp.133–61. For a comprehensive analysis of the 2005 SPD campaign see Nadine Mors, Die SPD im Bundes- tagswahlkampf 2005, unpublished BA thesis (University of Duisburg-Essen, 2005).

4. Manuel Lianos and Frank Schwarz, ‘Warm Up für den Wahlkampf. Warten auf den Startschuss’, Politik & Kommunikation, special election issue 1 (2005), pp.4–6. For a comprehensive analysis and documentation of the 2005 election campaign see the University of Duisburg-Essen's ‘voter information system’, www.waehlerinformationssystem.de/wis5.

5. Jens Tenscher, ‘Bundestagswahlkampf 2002: Zwischen strategischem Kalkül und der Inszenierung des Zufalls, in Jürgen W. Falter, Oscar W. Gabriel and Bernhard Wessels (eds), Wahlen und Wähler. Analysen aus Anlass der Bundestagswahl 2002 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2005), pp.102–33.

6. Ibid.

7. Der Spiegel 36, 2005.

8. Thomas Poguntke, ‘Germany’, European Journal of Political Research 44 (2005), pp.1019–24.

9. David M. Farrell and Paul Webb, ‘Political Parties as Campaign Organisations’, in Russell J. Dalton and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans: Political Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp.102–28.

10. Politik und Kommunikation, special election issue 1 (2005), pp.8–9.

11. The media's poll reporting revolved above all around the question whether CDU/CSU and FDP could together gain enough votes to form a coalition. As the campaign progressed, this appeared increasingly doubtful; at the same time polls became even more prominent in the media's reporting. Cf. Frank Brettschneider, ‘Bundestagswahlkampf und Medienberichterstattung’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 51–52 (2005), pp.19–26.

12. According to the documentation collected at http://www.wahlrecht.de/umfragen/index.htm (accessed 20 February, 2006), the five leading media pollsters Institut für Demoskopie Allensbach, Emnid, Forsa, Forschungsgruppe Wahlen and Infratest dimap conducted 83 polls between the NRW state election on 22 May 2005, and the Bundestag election on 18 September 2005.

13. Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, Eine Analyse der Wahl vom 18. September 2005, (Mannheim: Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, 2005), pp.16–24.

14. In order to appreciate this properly, it is important to take into account that since 1949 Germany always had been governed by party coalitions. Only once, in 1957, could one party – the CDU/CSU – gain an absolute majority of the popular vote, but even in that case it still preferred to continue its coalition with the FDP.

15. Karl-Rudolf Korte, ‘Was entschied die Bundestagswahl 2005?’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 51–52 (2005), pp.12–18.

16. This idea was in fact part of a more complex policy package aimed at shifting the increasing costs of unemployment from the system of social security to tax financing, in order to be able to decrease labour costs, against the background that high labour costs are widely seen as one of the major obstacles to rising employment in Germany. Accordingly, the VAT increase was to be accompanied by a concomitant decrease in unemployment insurance contributions. This concept clearly turned out to be too sophisticated for a polarised campaign environment, as will become clear later.

17. But not without making clear that this was not an issue that would prevent the Liberals from entering into a coalition with the CDU/CSU.

18. Schmitt-Beck, ‘Professionalisierung mit Verspätung’.

19. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, ‘New Modes of Campaigning’, in Russell J. Dalton and Hans-Dieter Klingemann (eds), Oxford Handbook on Political Behavior (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2007).

20. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and David M. Farrell, ‘Studying Political Campaigns and Their Effects’, in David M. Farrell and Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects in Elections and Referendums (London/New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.1–21; Daron R. Shaw, ‘A Study of Presidential Campaign Event Effects from 1952 to 1992’, Journal of Politics 61 (1999), pp.387–422.

21. Vito Cecere, ‘Man nennt es Oppo: Opposition Research als systematische Beobachtung des Gegners’, in Marco Althaus (ed.), Kampagne (Münster: Lit, 2001), pp.65–80.

22. Pippa Norris, John Curtice, David Sanders, Margaret Scammell, and Holli A. Semetko, On Message: Communicating the Campaign (London: Sage, 1999).

23. Although renamed ‘Arena 05’, the campaign centre was still part of party headquarters.

24. For a discussion of mediated and pseudo events, see Hans Mathias Kepplinger, ‘Theorien der Nachrichtenauswahl als Theorien der Realität’, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte 15 (1989), pp.3–16; Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and Barbara Pfetsch, ‘Politische Akteure und die Medien der Massenkommunikation: Zur Generierung von Öffentlichkeit in Wahlkämpfen’, in Friedhelm Neidhardt (ed.), Öffentlichkeit, öffentliche Meinung, soziale Bewegungen, Sonderheft 34 der Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1994), pp.106–38.

25. First in a speech in November 2004 and afterwards at repeated other occasions, Franz Müntefering criticised international investors, specifically private equity firms, as ‘locusts’ that purchase companies not to create values and employment, but only for the sake of realising quick profits at the expense of the companies' economic viability and the employees' futures. This was seen as a first indication of the SPD turning left again in response to the heavy criticism it earned from its followers for its ‘Agenda 2010’ policies.

26. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 3 August 2005.

27. Stoiber was quoted as having criticised East German voters of the Left.PDS as ‘stupid calves that elect their own butchers’ (alluding to a well-known saying), and as having claimed that ‘unfortunately not everyone is as clever as the Bavarians’, and that it could not be allowed ‘that yet again the frustrated from the East cast the votes that are pivotal for Germany's future’. Interestingly, it took a week until these statements from a speech in a Bavarian small town hit the national headlines. Allegedly, a Bavarian SPD politician was responsible for bringing these quotes to the attention of the press. The sad background of the other case was a terrible murder in a town in the East German state Brandenburg, where a mother was discovered to have killed nine babies. On this Brandenburg's Minister of the Interior Jörg Schönbohm (CDU) commented that such events were a consequence of the ‘proletarisation forced upon East German society by the SED regime’ of the GDR.

28. Remarkably, Kirchhof's own concept for taxation reform was even more radical than the one proposed by the FDP, which proposed more cuts than the CDU/CSU, but also remained at least partly within the logic of progressive taxation. Yet, at least initially, the FDP was fully supportive of Kirchhof.

29. Apparently, immediately after Kirchhof's decision to join the team (which he had to take at very short notice, i.e., within a few days), public relations specialists were assigned by the CDU to assist him in his public communication. Yet this does not seem to have helped much. Perhaps this has to do with the different role conceptions of university professors and intellectuals more generally, on the one hand, and professional politicians on the other. While message control is a self-evident part of the latters' daily life, Kirchhof apparently appreciated the public interest in everything he might have had to say on all kinds of issues, and so he willingly complied. Perhaps such differences in role conceptions are one of the reasons why it is so difficult for outsiders from different sectors of society to successfully move into politics.

30. Brettschneider, ‘Bundestagswahlkampf und Medienberichterstattung’.

31. Although Chancellor Schröder had initially aimed for two televised debates, Merkel complied only with having one, allegedly for lack of time for a second.

32. These were ARD, ZDF, RTL and SAT.1, the four channels with the highest ratings. This very unusual constellation also made for a bizarre detail of the debate: the discussion of the two leading candidates was moderated by four journalists – one from each channel. Almost 21 million spectators witnessed this TV event, corresponding to a market share of almost 60 per cent (cf. Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6 September 2005).

33. Forschungsgruppe Wahlen 2005, pp.25–8.

34. Thomas M. Holbrook, Do Campaigns Matter? (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1996); James E. Campbell, The American Campaign: U.S. Presidential Campaigns and the National Vote (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 2000); David Farrell and Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter? Campaign Effects and Referendums (London/New York: Routledge, 2005); Richard Johnston, André Blais, Henry E. Brady, and Jean Crête, Letting the People Decide: Dynamics of a Canadian Election (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Richard Johnston, Michael G. Hagen, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The 2000 Presidential Election and the Foundations of Party Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

35. Cf. Richard Johnston, ‘Capturing Campaigns in National Election Studies’, in Elihu Katz and Yael Warshel (eds), Election Studies: What's Their Use? (Boulder: Westview, 2001), pp.149–72; Johnston et al., Letting the People Decide; Henry E. Brady and Richard Johnston, ‘The Rolling Cross-Section and Causal Attribution’, in Henry E. Brady and Richard Johnston (eds), Capturing Campaign Effects (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Daniel Romer, Kate Kenski, Paul Waldman, Christopher Adasiewicz, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Capturing Campaign Dynamics: The National Annenberg Election Survey: Design, Method, and Data (New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

36. For detailed technical information on the dataset used in this article and procedures used for data collection, see Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, Thorsten Faas and Christian Holst, ‘Der Rolling Cross-Section Survey -ein Instrument zur Analyse dynamischer Prozesse der Einstellungsentwicklung. Bericht zur ersten deutschen RCS-Studie anlässlich der Bundestagwahl 2005’, ZUMA-Nachrichten 58 (2006), pp.13–49.

37. All data were collected by means of telephone surveys in the context of the project ‘Kampagnendynamik 2005’, directed by Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck and Thorsten Faas, and funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG). Responsibility for fieldwork lay with Ipsos GmbH, Mölln.

38. Schmitt-Beck and Farrell, ‘Studying Political Campaigns’.

39. Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People's Choice: How the Voter Makes Up his Mind in a Presidential Campaign, 3rd edn (New York/London: Columbia University, 1968).

40. Ibid.; Klaudia Erhardt, ‘Die unentschlossenen Wähler als Motor zyklischer Wahlabsichtsverläufe: Eine Untersuchung am Beispiel der Rückgewinnung der Wähler durch die CDU im Frühjahr 1994’, in Christine Dörner and Klaudia Erhardt (eds), Politische Meinungsbildung und Wahlverhalten: Analysen zum “Superwahljahr” 1994 (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), pp.15–118; Harold D. Clarke, David Sanders, Marianne C. Stewart, and Paul Whiteley, Political Choice in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).

41. Since for the individual days of observation within RCS studies only relatively small numbers of cases are available, rather large random errors must be taken into account. Analyses directly generated from raw data thus tend to produce rather uneven distributions. Usage of smoothing procedures is therefore advisable in order to arrive at clear representations of the underlying trends in the data (cf. Romer et al., ‘Capturing Campaign Dynamics’, 2004). The lines displayed in Figures 2 to 4 are generated using the nonparametric regression procedure LOWESS for this purpose, see William S. Cleveland, The Elements of Graphing Data, rev. edn (Murray Hill, NJ: AT&T Bell Labs, 1994); John Fox, Nonparametric Simple Regression: Smoothing Scatterplots (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2000). For each data point this ‘LOcally WEighted Scatterplot Smoother’ calculates an estimated value that is based on the corresponding observed value, but also on the observed values of neighbouring data points. In doing so, a weighting procedure is applied that assigns larger weights to closer data points, and lower weights to data points that are further away. By means of the so-called bandwidth researchers can determine how many neighbouring data points are to be used for these calculations. All analyses presented in this article are based on a bandwidth of .5, indicating that for each data point the 50 per cent nearest neighbours were included in the calculation. We used a robust LOWESS algorithm that also corrects for the distance of observed data points to the estimated trend line by weighing down outliers. In addition, our calculations took into account the varying numbers of cases that are available for each day of our survey. Days with more cases, and thus more statistical power and smaller random errors, entered our analyses with stronger weights than days with fewer cases. For all analyses a Stata ado program for robust LOWESS smoothing was used; cf. Isaías H. Salgado-Ugarte and Makoto Shimizu, ‘Robust Scatterplot Smoothing: Enhancements to Stata's ksm’, Stata Technical Bulletin 25 (1995), pp.25–9. We are greatly indebted to Isaías Salgado-Ugarte for providing us with his program. All analyses are based on data that were weighted to correct for effects of our CATI sampling design (i.e. unequal probabilities of respondents to be included in the sample due to varying sizes of households and of varying numbers of telephone mainlines per household), and to adjust for sampling bias with regard to our respondents' levels of education. The field period of the pre-election RCS survey ran from 8 August to 17 September 2005. Since due to the complicated sampling design of RCS surveys interviews collected on the first days do not yet constitute proper random samples, all dynamic analyses presented in this article start only on 12 August.

42. Johnston et al., Letting the People Decide; Johnston et al., The 2000 Presidential Election; Brady and Johnston, ‘The Rolling Cross-Section and Causal Attribution’; André Blais et al., ‘Campaign Dynamics in the 1997 Canadian Election’, Canadian Public Policy 25 (1999), pp.197–205; André Blais et al., Anatomy of a Liberal Victory: Making Sense of the Vote in the 2000 Canadian Election (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2002); Neil Nevitte et al., Unsteady State: The 1997 Canadian Federal Election (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jack Vowles et al., Voters' Victory? New Zealand's First Election Under Proportional Representation (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998); Voters' Veto: The 2002 Election in New Zealand and the Consolidation of Minority Government (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2004); Proportional Representation on Trial (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2002). Clarke et al., Political Choice in Britain. See also Richard Stöss, Stabilität im Umbruch: Wahlbeständigkeit und Parteienwettbewerb im ‘Superwahljahr’ 1994 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997), pp.104–43; Erhardt, ‘Die unentschlossenen Wähler’.

43. Joachim Hofmann-Göttig, ‘Umfragen zur Bundestagswahl vom 18. September 2005: Was taugte die “Sonntagsfrage”?’, unpublished manuscript (2005), http://www.mbfj.rlp.de/Wir_ueber_uns/downloads/Umfragen_zur_Bundestagswahl_2005.pdf, (accessed 23 February, 2006).

44. But see Patrick Fournier, Richard Nadeau, Andre Blais, Elisbeth Gidengil, and Neil Nevitte, ‘Validation of Time of Voting Decision Recall’, Public Opinion Quarterly 65 (2001), pp.95–107.

45. Lazarsfeld et al., The People's Choice.

46. Ibid.

47. Ibid.

48. Ibid.; Steven E. Finkel, ‘Reexamining the “Minimal Effects” Model in Recent Presidential Campaigns’, Journal of Politics 55 (1993), pp.1–21; Steven E. Finkel and Peter Schrott, ‘Campaign Effects on Voter Choice in the German Election of 1990’, British Journal of Political Science 25 (1995), pp.349–77; Stöss, Stabilität im Umbruch, pp.104–43; Erhardt, ‘Die unentschlossenen Wähler’.

49. Cf. Lawrence LeDuc, ‘Referendums and Elections: How Do Campaigns Differ?’ in Farrell and Schmitt-Beck (eds), Do Political Campaigns Matter?, pp.145–62.

50. Franz Urban Pappi and Susumu Shikano, ‘Regierungsabwahl ohne Regierungsneuwahl’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 46 (2005), pp.513–26.