Interpreting Partisan Dealignment in Germany

Abstract

Partisan ties in Germany have been weakening over the past three decades, which is changing the landscape of electoral politics. In contrast to a recent article by Dassonneville et al. in this journal, this article argues that a generational decline in partisanship is contributing to this dealignment trend, and virtually all of the new independents are more sophisticated apartisans who are politically engaged even though they lack party ties. These findings are based on the 1972–2009 time series of surveys by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. The results point to a more sophisticated German electorate that will inject more fluidity into electoral politics and empower more Germans to make reasonable electoral choices.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to thank Martin Kroh, Tony McGann, Robert Rohrschneider, Martin Wattenberg and Steve Weldon for their assistance and comments on this research.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Russell J. Dalton is Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Irvine and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Democracy at UC Irvine. He has received a Fulbright Professorship at the University of Mannheim, a Barbra Streisand Center fellowship, German Marshall Research Fellowship and a POSCO Fellowship at the East/West Center. His recent publications include Political Parties and Democratic Linkage (2012); The Good Citizen (2009) and Democratic Challenges, Democratic Choices (2004); he is co-editor of the Citizens, Context and Choice (2010) Party Politics in East Asia (2008), The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior (2007), Citizens, Democracy and Markets around the Pacific Rim (2006), Democracy Transformed? (2003) and Parties without Partisans (2001). His scholarly interests include comparative political behaviour, political parties, social movements, and empirical democratic theory.

Notes

1. Angus Campbell, Philip Converse, Warren Miller and Donald Stokes, The American Voter (New York: Wiley, 1960).

2. Herbert Weisberg and Steve Greene, ‘The Political Psychology of Party Identification’, in Michael MacKuen and George Rabinowitz (eds), Electoral Democracy (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p.115.

3. Kendall Baker, Russell Dalton and Kai Hildebrandt, Germany Transformed: Political Culture and the New Politics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Helmut Norpoth, ‘Party Identification in West Germany’, Comparative Political Studies 1 (1978), pp.36–61.

4. Russell Dalton and Martin Wattenberg (eds), Parties without Partisans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), ch.3; Kai Arzheimer, ‘Dead Men Walking? Party Identification in Germany, 1977–2002’, Electoral Studies 25 (2006), pp.791–807.

5. Ruth Dassonneville, Marc Hooghe and Bram Vanhoutte, ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects in the Decline of Party Identification in Germany’, German Politics 21 (2012), pp.209–27.

6. The question was designed by Manfred Berger of the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen, ‚Parteienidentifikation in der Bundesrepublik‘, Politische Vierteljahresschrift 14 (1978), pp.214–25.

7. All of the data in this article were provided by GESIS and the Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung in Cologne. The analyses and conclusions are my own responsibility.

8. Arzheimer, ‘Dead Men Walking?’; Dieter Ohr, Hermann Dülmer and Markus Quandt, ‘Kognitive Mobilisierung oder nicht-kognitive De-Mobilisierung? Eine längsschnittliche Analyse der deutschen Wählerschaft für die Jahre 1976 bis 2004’, in Oscar Gabriel, Bernhard Wessels and Jürgen Falter (eds), Wahlen und Wähler: Analysen aus Anlass der Bundestagswahl 2005 (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009).

9. For additional analyses of partisanship in the SOEP surveys see Alan Zuckerman and Martin Kroh, ‘The Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany’, Comparative European Politics 4 (2006), 65–93; Martin Kroh and Peter Selb, ‘Inheritance and the Dynamics of Party Identification’, Political Behavior 31 (2009), 559–574; Arzheimer, ‘Dead Men Walking?’, provides more extensive trend data for the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen surveys.

10. See the social learning model of partisanship for new democracies in Philip Converse, ‘Of Time and Partisan Stability’, Comparative Politics 2 (1969), pp.139–71; Russell Dalton and Steven Weldon, ‘Partisanship and Party System Institutionalization’, Party Politics 13 (March 2007), pp.179–96.

11. Dassonneville et al., ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects’, p.223.

12. I used the 1972 German Election Study (S0635), the 1976 German Election Study (S0823), the 1980 German Election Study (S1053) and the Politbarometer surveys for other elections. For the Politbarometers I typically pooled three surveys spanning the pre-election to post-election period to increase the reliability of age group estimates.

13. For example, plotting a trend line for the age cohorts in Figure 2, the per annum growth in nonpartisans is twice as large among those under 30 as among those over 60: Under 30 (b = 0.690), 30–44 years (0.623), 45–59 (0.380), and aged 60 and over (0.338).

14. Martin Kroh, ‘Growth Trajectories in Partisanship Strength’, Electoral Studies 33 (March 2014) (special issue, Anja Neundorf and Richard Niemi [eds]), ‘Beyond Political Socialization: New Approaches to Age, Period, Cohort Analysis’.

15. Kroh and Selb's analysis of partisan learning in Germany suggests that because of their less-partisan formative years, younger generations will not develop their elders' stronger political ties as they age. Martin Kroh and Peter Selb, ‘Individual and Contextual Origins of Durable Partisanship’, in John Bartle and Paolo Bellucci (eds.), Political Parties and Partisanship (London: Routledge, 2009).

16. The cumulative Politbarometer data file has collapsed age categories instead of exact age, so I can only compare age groups and not birth generations across surveys. I can do a partial generational comparison from 1980 to 2005 because the 1980 survey coded exact age. These comparisons show that among those aged 18–44 in 1980, their partisanship was slightly lower when they were 40–69 in 2005 (about 10 per cent lower). By comparison, the percentage of partisans among 18–44 year olds in 2005 was about 17 per cent lower than the same age group in 1980 (see Figure 1).

17. See Martin Kroh, ‘Documentation of Sample Sizes and Panel Attrition in the German Socio Economic Panel (SOEP) (1984 until 2009)’, DWI Data Documentation 50, 2010, available from http://www.diw.de.

18. Kroh and Selb, ‘Individual and Contextual Origins of Durable Partisanship’; Martin Kroh and Peter Selb, ‘Inheritance and the Dynamics of Party Identification’, Political Behavior 31 (1999), pp.559–574; Zuckerman and Kroh, ‘The Social Logic of Bounded Partisanship in Germany’; Kroh, ‘Growth Trajectories in Partisanship Strength’.

19. Christopher Achen has cautioned that too many control variables without theoretical consideration of the implications can distort the results from multivariate models rather than provide clarity: Christopher Achen, ‘Toward a New Political Methodology’, Annual Review of Political Science 5 (2002), pp.203–34; Christopher Achen, ‘Let's Put Garbage-Can Regressions and Garbage-Can Probits Where They Belong’, Conflict Management and Peace Science 22 (2005), pp.327–39.

20. Ohr et al., ‘Kognitive Mobilisierung oder nicht-kognitive De-Mobilisierung?’; Jeremy Albright, ‘Does Political Knowledge Erode Party Attachments? A Review of the Cognitive Mobilization Thesis’, Electoral Studies 28 (2009), pp.248–60; Arzheimer, ‘Dead Men Walking?’

21. Dassonneville et al., ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects’, p.224.

22. Russell Dalton, The Apartisan American (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2012); Russell Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’, Electoral Studies 31 (2012), pp.35–45.

23. Both elements have been present in my writing, but my recent work more clearly discusses the combination of both factors as important. See Dalton, The Apartisan American, pp.46–8; Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’.

24. Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’, p.39; virtually the identical point is made in Russell Dalton, ‘Partisan Mobilization, Cognitive Mobilization and the Changing American Electorate’, Electoral Studies 26 (2007), pp.274–86.

25. Dassonneville et al. state: ‘According to Dalton's cognitive mobilization theory, we expect that citizens with high levels of political sophistication are less likely to be party identifiers’. Dassonneville et al., ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects’, p.214. ‘In contrast to Dalton's argument, party identification is clearly higher among the classically privileged social groups: older citizens, men and the highly educated’, ibid., p.220.

26. Cognitive mobilisation is measured as the combination of political interest and educational level. For additional explanation see Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’. A comparable interest question was not available in the 1972 election survey, so the time series begins in 1976.

27. The increase in 2009 is primarily due to a drop in strong interest in politics. This, so far, seems a unique pattern in this election perhaps as a reaction to the limited sense of political efficacy felt after the Grand Coalition of CDU/CSU and SPD. The 2009 results deviate from the trend over the ten previous elections.

28. Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’, pp.40–41.

29. Dalton, The Apartisan American, ch.9; Inglehart, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Societies, ch.11.

30. Dassonneville et al., ‘Age, Period and Cohort Effects’, p.224; also see Ohr et al., ‘Kognitive Mobilisierung oder nicht-kognitive De-Mobilisierung?’

31. Dalton, ‘Apartisans and the Changing German Electorate’, pp.41–4.

32. Bernhard Wessels, ‘Re-mobilisierung, Floating or Adwanderung? Wechselwahler 2002 and 2005 im Vergleich’, In Frank Brettschneider, Oscar Niedermayer, and Bernhard Wessels (eds.), Die Bundestag 2005 (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009).

33. Robert Rohrschneider and Steven Whitefield, The Strain of Representation: How Parties Represent Diverse Voters in Western and Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).