Another Dog that didn’t Bark? Less Dealignment and more Partisanship in the 2013 Bundestag Election

Abstract

Using new data for the 1977–2012 period, this article shows that dealignment has halted during the last decade amongst older and better educated West German voters, and that party identification is now more widespread than it was in the 1990s in the east. For voters who identified with one of the relevant parties at the time of the 2013 election, their vote choice was more or less a foregone conclusion, as candidates and issues played only a minor role for this group. A detailed analysis of leftist voters shows that supporters of the Greens, the Left, and the SPD have broadly similar preferences but diverging partisan identities. Even amongst western voters of the Left, most respondents claim to be identifiers. This suggests that the fragmentation of the left is entrenched, and that ‘agenda’ policies have triggered a realignment.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kai Arzheimer is Professor of Political Science and Head of the German Politics and Political Sociology unit at the University of Mainz, Germany. He has published widely in the field of political parties, electoral behaviour, and quantitative methods.

Notes

1 See Russell J. Dalton, Scott C. Flanagan, and Paul Allen Beck (eds), Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) for a useful summary.

2 Jürgen W. Falter, ‘Zur Validierung theoretischer Konstrukte – Wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte des Validierungskonzepts’, Zeitschrift für Soziologie 6 (1977), pp.349–69.

3 Dieter Roth, Empirische Wahlforschung. Ursprung, Theorien, Instrumente und Methoden, 2nd ed. (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2008), p.156.

4 Colin Crouch, Social Change in Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).

5 Russell J. Dalton, ‘Cognitive Mobilization and Partisan Dealignment in Advanced Industrial Democracies’, Journal of Politics 46 (1984), pp.264–84.

6 Kai Arzheimer, ‘“Dead Men Walking?” Party Identification in Germany, 1977–2002’, Electoral Studies 25 (2006), pp.791–807.

7 Anja Neundorf, Daniel Stegmueller, and Thomas J. Scotto, ‘The Individual-Level Dynamics of Bounded Partisanship’, Public Opinion Quarterly 75/3 (2011), pp.458–82. doi: 10.1093/poq/nfr018.

8 Ruth Dassonneville, Marc Hooghe, and Bram Vanhoutte, ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects in the Decline of Party Identification in Germany: An Analysis of a Two Decade Panel Study in Germany (1992–2009)’, German Politics 2 (2012), pp.209–27.

9 Russell J. Dalton, ‘Interpreting Partisan Dealignment in Germany’, German Politics 23/1–2 (2014), pp.134–44.

10 Jeremy J. Albright, ‘Does Political Knowledge Erode Party Attachments? A Review of the Cognitive Mobilization Thesis’, Electoral Studies 28/2 (2009), pp.248–260.

11 Kai Arzheimer and Harald Schoen, ‘Erste Schritte auf kaum erschlossenem Terrain. Zur Stabilität der Parteiidentifikation in Deutschland’, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 46 (2005), pp.629–54.

12 Arzheimer, ‘“Dead Men Walking?” Party Identification in Germany, 1977–2002’.

13 Ibid.

14 Patrick Royston and Willi Sauerbrei, Multivariable Model-building: A Pragmatic Approach to Regression Analysis Based on Fractional Polynomials for Modelling Continuous Variables (Chichester: Wiley, 2008).

15 Philip E. Converse, ‘Of Time and Partisan Stability, Comparative Political Studies 2 (1969), pp.139–71.

16 Karen Oppenheim Mason et al., ‘Some Methodological Issues in Cohort Analysis of Archival Data’, American Sociological Review 38 (1973), pp.242–58.

17 Dassonneville et al., ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects in the Decline of Party Identification in Germany’.

18 Petra Buhr and Johannes Huinink, ‘The German Low Fertility. How We Got There and What We Can Expect for the Future’, European Sociological Review 31/2 (2015), pp.197–210.

19 Carsten Bluck and Henry Kreikenbom, ‘Die Wähler in der DDR: Nur issue-orientiert oder auch parteigebunden?’, Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen 22 (1991), pp.495–502.

20 R. Michael Alvarez and Jonathan Nagler, ‘When Politics and Models Collide. Estimating Models of Multiparty Elections’, American Journal of Political Science 42 (1998), pp.55–96.

21 J. Scott Long and Jeremy Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, 2nd ed. (College Station: Stata Press, 2006), p.307.

22 Kai Arzheimer, ‘The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?’, West European Politics 38 (2015), pp.535–56.

23 For the Greens, Trittin and Katrin Göring-Eckardt were joint frontrunners, but Trittin received many more votes in the internal ballot for the position and was much more prominent in the media, and the GLES did not even collect thermometer data for Göring-Eckardt. Similarly, Merkel as the sitting chancellor was treated as the only relevant candidate for the Christian Democrats, although technically Gerda Hasselfeldt, who topped the CSU’s list, could also be deemed to have been a ‘Spitzenkandidat’.

24 Taxes/welfare spending: ‘And what is your own opinion regarding taxes and social welfare services? 0 – more benefits offered by the social state, even if this means an increase in taxation; 10 – lower taxes, even if this means a reduction in the benefits offered by the social state’. Immigration: ‘And what is your opinion regarding immigration? 0 – immigration should be facilitated; 10 – immigration should be restricted’.

25 Long and Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, p.305.

26 Robert Rohrschneider, Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck, and Franziska Jung, ‘Short-term Factors versus Long-term Values: Explaining the 2009 Election Results’, Electoral Studies 31/1 (2012), pp.20–34.

27 Obviously, it would have been possible to estimate a single model for all of Germany by including appropriate interaction terms, but this would have introduced an additional layer of complexity.

28 Long and Freese, Regression Models for Categorical Dependent Variables Using Stata, p.111.

29 The correction suggested by Long and Freese yields a slightly lower rate of 72 per cent.

30 Dan Hough, Michael Koß, and Jonathan Olsen. The Left Party in Contemporary German Politics (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

31 Howard L. Reiter, ‘Party Decline in the West. A Skeptic’s View’, Journal of Theoretical Politics 1 (1989), pp.325–48.

32 Arzheimer, ‘“Dead Men Walking?” Party Identification in Germany, 1977–2002’.

33 Dalton, ‘Interpreting Partisan Dealignment in Germany’, p.140.