As part of our continuing series of “international election analysis”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/09/election_reports_and_political.html from political scientists, I am pleased that we now have our first example of “pre-election”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/09/preelection_analysis_2009_germ_1.html and post-election analysis of the same election. (As a reminder, please feel free to email me directly if you are interested in writing on any upcoming elections.) Here is the post-election analysis of this weekend’s 2009 German parliamentary elections from “Dominik Duell”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/politics.meetPhD and “Alexander Herzog”:http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/politics.meetPhD of NYU:
The 2009 German parliamentary election is over and with more and more certainty Germany faces the end of the grand coalition and a new center-right government of Christian Democrats (CDU and CSU) and Free Democrats (FDP). The Social Democrats (SPD) received their worst result in the history of democratic elections since 1949. Recently, we argued “in this blog”:https://themonkeycage.org/2009/09/preelection_analysis_2009_germ_1.html that this was due to SPD’s inability to create an ideological label, which distinguished the party from their grand coalition partner CDU. This caused many voters on the left to deviate to the Green party and especially to The Left. So far, however, we have not said anything about where voters actually see themselves located within the political space. The figure below shows where survey respondents locate themselves on the left-right dimension and where they perceived SPD and CDU to be positioned.
We assumed that voters go for the party which is closest to them and moving to the right should thus have been beneficial to the Left and causing a gain among left-leaning voters. Voters, however, were all assembled around the center with highest density; that actually means that in moving to the right the SPD should have gained more votes around the center than the party should have lost on the left side. So what did the SPD actually lose in this grand coalition if not the perceived closeness to voters? The final argument might read like this: The Social Democrats lost their ability to be seen as the leader of the left. This on the one hand enabled The Left to become more mainstream by being the leading voice on formerly SPD-core ideological themes like social justice. On the other hand, and because of resentments among many Western Germans against the Left, this ideological “weakness” also triggered many former SPD voters not to turn out at all.
The Left approached a position of being supplementary to the SPD, whereas the Free Democrats on the right remained a to the CDU complementary political force. In a recently published paper (which can be found here “ungated”:http://webrum.uni-mannheim.de/sowi/shikanos/Publikation/StrategicPRVoting_WEP_final.pdf and here in “West European Politics”:http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all~content=a910763277), Shikano, Herrmann, and Thurner lay out in more detail what many observers of German elections usually suggest. Voters strategically split their votes to bring coalitions to power and not just simply to support a single party.
The Free Democrats scored their best result ever in second votes (party list votes; 15 per cent) but did not challenge the CDU/CSU in any of the single-member districts (first vote); this splitting promoted the center-right coalition. The Left, however, took several additional districts in first and second vote from the SPD, especially in Eastern Germany. Voters on the right half of the spectrum strategically installed a CDU-FDP coalition with a strong leading figure, the CDU-chancellor Angela Merkel. The SPD, however, did not make clear that she is the leader of the left and thus did not gave the voters enough information at hand to act in a left- coalition promoting way. Of course, due to The Left’s communist past, it is a challenge for the SPD how to incorporate The Left in any alliance without being negatively affected. Nevertheless, without a decent plan how to lead the left side, the SPD will vanish, a threat not present currently to the CDU on the right.