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Muster des Parteienwettbewerbs zur Bundestagswahl 2021: Implikationen für die Regierungsbildung und die Stabilität der Ampelkoalition
Abstract
Parteien und ihre Repräsentanten streben im politischen Entscheidungsprozess nicht nur nach der Maximierung ihres Stimmenanteils, sondern auch danach, in der Exekutive möglichst viele Ämter zu besetzen, um so ein Maximum ihrer inhaltlichen Forderungen zu implementieren. Zur Erreichung dieser Ziele wenden Parteien eine Reihe von Mechanismen in ihren Wahlkämpfen an, zu denen unter anderem auch die Etablierung eines spezifischen programmatischen Angebots an die Wählerschaft zählt. Bestehende Forschung zeigt, dass zum einen Parteien zwar weitgehend stabile Positionen zu zentralen Sachfragen einnehmen, diese aber in Abhängigkeit der Präferenzverteilung innerhalb des Elektorats im Zeitverlauf verschieben. Gleichzeitig wissen wir, dass die programmatischen Profile der Parteien ein zentrales Element in der Erklärung der Koalitionsbildungsprozesse darstellen sowie eine wichtige Rolle dafür spielen, wie stabil eine Mehrparteienregierung im Verlauf einer Legislaturperiode ist. Dieser Beitrag untersucht mit Hilfe des „Political Heart“-Modells und auf der Grundlage der Daten des Open Expert Survey, in dem die programmatischen Profile der Parteien zur Bundestagswahl 2021 erhoben wurden, die Regierungsbildung auf Bundesebene und identifiziert mögliche Konfliktfelder für die zustande gekommene Koalition aus Sozialdemokraten, Grünen und Freien Demokraten, die diese destabilisieren könnten. Letzteres geschieht auch vor dem Hintergrund des Angriffskriegs Russlands auf die Ukraine, der die auf eine progressive Gesellschaftspolitik ausgerichtete Politik der „Ampelkoalition“ in den Hintergrund rücken und Themenfelder wie Verteidigungs- und Außenpolitik, Migration, Finanzen, Energie und Klimaschutz zentral werden ließ. Damit wurden solche Politikfelder von hoher Relevanz für das tagespolitische Handeln, in denen es – im Gegensatz zur Gesellschaftspolitik – große Unterschiede zwischen den drei Regierungsparteien gibt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass keine große Gefahr der Destabilisierung der Ampelkoalition aufgrund der neuen Themenlage besteht, da die programmatische Parteienkonstellation keine mehrheitsfähigen und gewünschten Alternativen auch bei Berücksichtigung salienter Politikfelder wie Migrations-, Außen- und Klimapolitik zulässt.
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Most parliamentary democracies have seen a rise of populist radical parties during the past decades. Many countries have also experienced severely delayed government formation processes, with caretaker governments in office for extended periods of time. Are these delays related to the rise of radical parties? We argue that the rise of populist radical parties may prolong the bargaining process, due to the fact that these parties are often treated as pariahs by other parties during election campaigns, which creates a complex bargaining situation after the election. We evaluate this claim by studying 121 government formation processes in the German States from 1990 until 2021, using original data which includes statements made by parties during election campaigns. The findings show that a higher share of seats allocated to parties from the radical right and radical left results in an increasing amount of days until a new government is voted into office. We also find that when a party that has been characterized as being 'non-coalitionable' during the election campaign ends up among the negotiating parties, the government formation process is severely delayed. These findings suggest that the rise of populist radical parties may create severe challenges for parliamentary democracy.
We make use of party press releases and Wikipedia page view data to study issue dynamics and its determinants of a relatively young right-wing populist party. By applying structural topic models, we analyse 2262 press releases of the 'Alternative for Germany' (AfD) from 2013 until 2019. The findings reveal, first, that European integration, EU economic policy, and migration are prevalent topics, but that a change occurs over time so that the focus on economic policy decreases as the focus on migration policy increases. In addition, we show-by using novel data that provides information on the number of daily hits of entries in the German Wikipedia-that the AfD took the attention into account that people attached to European integration and migration issues when preparing their press releases. The results support the findings of existing studies and imply that the content of press releases can be used for measuring changes in the policy profile of parties during a legislative period when normally no manifestos are published, and that the interest in Wikipedia articles can serve as a proxy for the dynamics of issue salience among the population. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a combination of these two data sources is a fruitful approach for studying the determinants of short-term issue dynamics.
Zusammenfassung
Diese Research Note berichtet zentrale Ergebnisse des Open Expert Surveys 2021 (OES21). In diesem Expert:innen-Survey, der vor der Bundestagswahl 2021 durchgeführt wurde, haben mehr als 300 Politikwissenschaftler:innen die wichtigsten Parteien entlang zentraler politischer Sachfragen verortet und deren Wichtigkeit für die jeweilige Partei geschätzt. Der OES21 unterscheidet sich von gängigen Expert:innenbefragungen in zweierlei Hinsicht. Zum einen umfasst der Survey zahlreiche themenspezifische Items, die in anderen Befragungen bislang keine Beachtung fanden. Zum anderen ist die Anzahl der Expert:innen sehr hoch, wodurch Zusammenhänge in der Positionierung auf Ebene der einzelnen Expert:innen analysiert werden können.
Zusammenfassung
Das komplexer gewordene bundesdeutsche Parteiensystem und die Angleichung in der Stärke der Parteien bei Wahlen führt zu einem ebenfalls komplexeren Koalitions- und Regierungsbildungsprozess auf Bundes- wie Landesebene. Diese Kurzanalyse präsentiert die programmatischen Profile der im Bundestag vertretenen Parteien auf der Grundlage ihrer zur Bundestagswahl 2021 verfassten Wahlprogramme. Im Anschluss daran wird – auf der Basis der Determinanten der Regierungs- und Koalitionsbildung in Deutschland in den Bundesländern und auf Bundesebene seit 1990 – mit Rückgriff auf unterschiedliche Szenarien der Sitzverteilung im 20. Deutschen Bundestag, die neben den sich aus dem Wahlergebnis ergebenden Parteienkonstellationen auch andere Koalitionsoptionen umfassen, die jeweils wahrscheinlichste Regierungskoalition ermittelt. Die Ergebnisse verdeutlichen, dass die Regierungsbildung in Deutschland von office- und policy-orientierten Koalitionstheorien sowie den institutionell-kontextuellen Rahmenbedingungen entscheidend beeinflusst wird und eine „Ampelkoalition“ das wahrscheinlichste Ergebnis des Regierungsbildungsprozesses 2021 ist, wenn eine „große Koalition“ aus Union und SPD als ausgeschlossen betrachtet wird.
Intra-party politics has long been neglected due to lacking data sources. While we have a good understanding of the dynamics of ideological competition between parties, we know less about how individuals or groups inside parties influence policy, leadership selection and coalition bargaining. These questions can only be answered if we can place individual politicians and sub-party groups like factions on the same dimensions as in inter-party competition. This task has been notoriously difficult, as most existing measures either work on the party level, or are in other ways determined by the party agenda. Social media is a new data source that allows analyzing positions of individual politicians in party-centered systems, as it is subject to limited party control. I apply canonical correspondence analysis to account for hierarchical data structures and estimate multidimensional positions of the Twitter accounts of 498 Members of the German Bundestag based on more than 800,000 tweets since 2017. To test the effect of intra-party actors on their relative ideological placement, I coded the faction membership of 247 Twitter users in the Bundestag. I show that Twitter text reproduces party positions and dimensions. Members of factions are more likely to represent their faction’s positions, both on the cultural and the economic dimension.
Existing empirical research suggests that there are two mechanisms through which pre-electoral coalition signals shape voting behavior. According to these, coalition signals both shift the perceived ideological positions of parties and prime coalition considerations at the cost of party considerations. The work at hand is the first to test another possibility of how coalition signals affect voting. This coalition expectation mechanism claims that coalition signals affect voting decisions by changing voters' expectations about which coalitions are likely to form after the election. Moreover, this paper provides the first integrative overview of all three mechanisms that link coalition signals and individual voting behavior. Results from a survey experiment conducted during Sweden's 2018 general election suggest that the coalition expectation mechanism can indeed be at work. By showing how parties' pre-electoral coalition behavior enter a voter's decision calculus, the paper provides important insights for the literature on strategic voting theories in proportional systems.
What influences parties’ issue attention towards immigration and integration? This study provides answers to this question by focusing on the party competition at the regional level in Germany, a country that has been strongly affected by the refugee crisis. Building on a novel data set which covers altogether 510 electoral manifestos during 108 federal and regional elections between 1990 and 2016, we assess the influence of party-specific, situational as well as structural factors on issue attention towards immigration and integration policies. Using descriptive statistics and regression analysis, we find that parties’ attention is significantly associated with citizens’ attention towards these issues. Furthermore, ideologically conflicting parties differ considerably in the share of their manifestos they devote to the issue. Interestingly, the electoral threat by populist radical right parties has no effect on the issue attention of mainstream competitors.
The common wisdom in the literature is that citizens cast their vote based on party characteristics. Such âparty-centeredâ voting behavior would imply that voters do not consider potential coalitions. In practice, we often observe parties sending coalition signals during election campaigns. If it is true that voters do not care about these coalitions, why would parties send signal in the first place? So far very little is know about how such coalition signals work. We present a simple model that incorporates coalition signals into a voterâs individual decision-making process. We argue that coalition signals have an indirect effect on voting. They increase the importance of coalition characteristics in voterâs decision calculus. In order to test this expectation we employ a unique survey-experiment conducted in the Austrian election study of 2006. Preliminary results support our expectation.
Der Grad der Übereinstimmung zwischen den Politikangeboten der Parteien und der Politiknachfrage der Wählerinnen und Wähler bietet den Wählern Kriterien für die Wahlentscheidung und den Parteien Anhaltspunkte für ihren Wettbewerb um Wählerstimmen. Diese Übereinstimmung wird in der empirischen Wählerforschung mit ideologischen Skalen wie Links-Rechts oder mit Policy-Skalen zu wichtigen Themen der politischen Auseinandersetzung gemessen. Wenn Befragte über die Positionen der einzelnen Parteien auf den vorgegebenen Skalen urteilen und Angaben über ihren eigenen Standpunkt machen, besteht die Gefahr von Urteilsverzerrungen. Befragte neigen dazu, die Position von Parteien, die sie wertschätzen, näher an sich heranzurücken (Assimilationseffekt) und die Distanz zu den anderen Parteien zu überschätzen (Kontrasteffekt). Parteien benötigen für ihre Planung aber Positionsschätzungen, über die in der Wählerschaft große Urteilskonkordanz besteht. Die Mittelwerte sind als Positionsschätzer ungeeignet, da sie von gleichem Skalengebrauch der Befragten ohne Berücksichtigung des differential item functioning ausgehen. Wir wenden ein bayesianisches faktoranalytisches Messverfahren an, das aus den Befragtenangaben zu den Parteipositionen „wahre“ Positionen berechnet, die für die Befragten als „gleich wahrgenommen“ interpretiert werden. Wir demonstrieren das Verfahren mit den im Vorwahlquerschnitt der GLES abgefragten Skalen: Links-Rechts, sozialstaatliche Leistungen versus Steuern/Abgaben, Einwanderungspolitik und Klimaschutz. Die ursprünglichen Skalenangaben werden unter Annahme eines linearen Zusammenhangs in die „wahren“ Parteiwerte umgerechnet und die eigene Einstellung der Befragten wird mit den bei der Parteienwahrnehmung gewonnenen Koeffizienten an die gemeinsame Parteiskala angepasst. Die Häufigkeitsverteilungen der auf diese Weise erhaltenen Wähleridealpunkte fassen zusammen mit den entsprechenden Parteiwerten die zentralen Informationen zur Charakterisierung und Anwendung räumlicher Modelle des Parteienwettbewerbs zusammen (vgl. Abbildung 4).
Abstract translation
Agreement between policy supply by parties and policy demand by voters offers the electorate criteria for voting and provides parties with an informative basis for campaigning. Survey researchers measure such agreement on ideological scales like left-right or policy scales that address presumably important issues. When respondents deliver judgments about party positions on scales presented to them and when they report their own attitude on these scales, perceptual biases are frequent. Respondents often underestimate the distance to parties they like (assimilation effect) while they tend to overestimate the distance to parties they dislike (contrast effect). Parties, however, depend on unbiased positional information about which voters agree. Simply computing party means on these scales is unsatisfactory since differential item functioning is not taken into account. We apply a Bayesian implementation of the Aldrich-McKelvey factor analytic scaling procedure to derive “true” but latent party positions from respondents’ answers. These positions are “true” in the sense that respondents possess a common understanding of the rescaled positions. We demonstrate the procedure by analyzing the left-right scale and three policy scales concerning the trade-off between welfare payments and taxes, immigration policy and climate change policy which were asked in the pre-election survey of the 2013 German Longitudinal Election Study. Assuming a linear relation between original answers and rescaled party scores we get regression coefficients for party perceptions which allow us also a rescaling of respondents’ original self-placements. By this means we get frequency distributions of respondents’ own rescaled policy demands together with commonly perceived policy offers of parties as the central information for spatial models of party competition.
Zusammenfassung??Das deutsche Regierungssystem wird als volles Zweiebenensystem konzipiert, in dem die Landesregierungen ?ber den Bundesrat bundespolitische Entscheidungskompetenzen haben und die Bildung der Landesregierungen f?r die Regierungs- und Oppositionsparteien im Bund deshalb bundespolitisch wichtig ist. Die Frage ist, ob sich ein systematischer Einfluss der Bundesparteien auf die Regierungsbildung in den L?ndern nachweisen l?sst. Die Frage wird mit indirekter Beweisf?hrung beantwortet. Selbst wenn zentrale, koalitionstheoretisch abgeleitete Determinanten der Regierungsbildung konstant gehalten werden, werden in den deutschen Bundesl?ndern A-Mehrheitskoalitionen aus Parteien, die auch im Bund regieren, oder B-Mehrheitskoalitionen aus Parteien, die im Bund nicht regieren, statt gemischten oder Minderheitsregierungen ?berzuf?llig h?ufig gebildet. Dabei wird f?r jede der 182 Regierungsbildungssituationen in den Bundesl?ndern von 1949 bis 2003 die tats?chlich gebildete Regierung in Beziehung gesetzt zu den jeweils m?glichen Regierungen.
Although there are well-developed theories of two-party competition in a one-dimensional policy space, it has proven extremely difficult to construct a model of multi-party competition (with three or more parties) in two or more dimensions. One difficulty with developing such a model is due to the phenomenon of political uncertainty over the expected nature of the governing coalition. A cooperative equilibrium notion, the `political heart', is used here to characterise post-election coalition formation. Empirical evidence from 12 European political systems in the post-war period is presented, to corroborate this equilibrium concept. Using this notion, a typology based on fragmentation and centrality is proposed. A model of multi-party competition over pre-election policy proposals is described. It is argued that this model is compatible with the predictions of the political heart concerning coalition formation.
A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. This essential text is divided into three clear parts: Part I introduces the study, themes and methodology Part II deals in depth with the wide range of issues involved in estimating and analyzing the policy positions of key political actors. Part III is the key data section that identifies key policy dimensions across the 47 countries, detailing their party positions and median legislators, and is complemented by graphical representations of each party system. This book is an invaluable reference for all political scientists, particularly those interested in party policy and comparative politics.
Current research on coalition formation is plagued by two serious problems. First, we cannot predict more than about one-third of the Western European governments, and, second, we do not have a good understanding of the causal mechanisms that explain the effects found in large-n coalition studies. This article illustrates that by combining statistical and case study analyses we can solve these problems. Since statistical analyses are well equipped for measuring and isolating effects, we argue that a coalition study should start with such an analysis. Predictions made in this analysis are then used to select cases. In order to study the mechanisms underlying effects found in large-n coalition studies, we argue for selecting cases that are predicted, and then applying the method of process verification. In order to find new explanatory variables, we argue for selecting cases that are deviant, and then applying the method of process induction. Substantive results of our analysis for coalition theory point to the importance of party strategies based on parties' past experiences, which aim at curtailing present and future costs of competing and governing with other parties.
Previous research explains the evolution of parties' ideological positions in terms of decision rules that stress the uncertainty of the political environment. The authors extend this research by examining whether parties adjust their ideologies in response to two possible influences: shifts in public opinion, and past election results. Their empirical analyses, which are based on the Comparative Manifesto Project's codings of parties' post-war programmes in eight West European nations, suggest that parties respond to shifts in public opinion, but that these effects are only significant in situations where public opinion is clearly shifting away from the party's policy positions. By contrast, no evidence is found here that parties adjust their ideologies in response to past election results. These findings have important implications for parties' election strategies and for models of political representation.
Previous research on coalition politics has found an “incumbency advantage” in government formation, but it has provided no clear explanation as to why this advantage exists. We classify existing theories as either preference-based or institutions-based explanations for why incumbent coalitions might be likely to form again, and we integrate these explanations into a coherent theoretical argument. We also claim that it is possible, to some extent, to distinguish these explanations empirically by taking into account the “historical context” of coalition bargaining. Using a comprehensive new data set on coalition bargaining in Europe, we show that coalitions, in general, are more likely to form if the parties comprising them have worked together in the recent past, and that incumbent coalitions are more likely to re-form if partners have not experienced a severe public conflict while in office together or suffered a recent setback at the polls. The incumbency advantage disappears completely if partners have become mired in conflict or have lost legislative seats (even after accounting for the impact of seat share on coalition size). Moreover, in certain circumstances, institutional rules that grant incumbents an advantage in coalition bargaining greatly enhance their ability to remain in office.
We present a new way of extracting policy positions from political texts that treats texts not as discourses to be understood and interpreted but rather, as data in the form of words. We compare this approach to previous methods of text analysis and use it to replicate published estimates of the policy positions of political parties in Britain and Ireland, on both economic and social policy dimensions. We "export" the method to a non-English-language environment, analyzing the policy positions of German parties, including the PDS as it entered the former West German party system. Finally, we extend its application beyond the analysis of party manifestos, to the estimation of political positions from legislative speeches. Our "language-blind" word scoring technique successfully replicates published policy estimates without the substantial costs of time and labor that these require. Furthermore, unlike in any previous method for extracting policy positions from political texts, we provide uncertainty measures for our estimates, allowing analysts to make informed judgments of the extent to which differences between two estimated policy positions can be viewed as significant or merely as products of measurement error.
To 'analyse' means to break into components and understand. But new readers find modern mathematical theories of politics so inaccessible that analysis is difficult. Where does one start? Analytical Politics is an introduction to analytical theories of politics, explicitly designed both for the interested professional and students in political science. We cannot evaluate how well governments perform without some baseline for comparison: what should governments be doing? This book focuses on the role of the 'center' in politics, drawing from the classical political theories of Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, and others. The main questions in Analytical Politics involve the existence and stability of the center; when does it exist? When should the center guide policy? How do alternative voting rules help in discovering the center? An understanding of the work reviewed here is essential for anyone who hopes to evaluate the performance or predict the actions of democratic governments.
Unterscheidet sich die CDU im Saarland in ihren programmatischen Standpunkten und ihrem Themenprofil von den Christdemokraten in Schleswig-Holstein oder in den Stadtstaaten Berlin, Bremen und Hamburg? Steht die SPD in Baden-Württemberg oder Hessen weiter links als der sozialdemokratische Landesverband im benachbarten Rheinland-Pfalz? Gibt es programmatische Unterschiede zwischen den AfD-Landesverbänden? Wenn ja, warum ist das der Fall und welche Konsequenzen ergeben sich daraus? Das Buch untersucht die bundeslandspezifischen Eigenheiten des Parteienwettbewerbs anhand einer Analyse aller zwischen 1990 und 2019 verfassten Landtagswahlprogramme. Dies geschieht vor dem Hintergrund der historischen Entwicklung der Parteiensysteme in den Ländern einerseits und auf der Grundlage theoretischer Modelle andererseits. Die Ergebnisse zeichnen ein differenziertes Bild des Parteienwettbewerbs im deutschen Mehrebenensystem. So zeigen sich Unterschiede in den zentralen Politikdimensionen, die ihre Ursachen in der Sozialstruktur der jeweiligen Wählerschaft, aber auch in taktischen Bestrebungen der Parteien haben. Diese Variation beeinflusst wiederum die Regierungsbildung und die Muster des Regierens in Koalitionen in den deutschen Bundesländern.
Der Inhalt
• Einleitung
• Parteienwettbewerb in Mehrebenensystemen
• Dimensionen des politischen Wettbewerbs
• Parteiensysteme und Parteienwettbewerb in den Bundesländern von 1990 bis 2019
• Vergleichende Analysen
• Schlussbetrachtung
Die Autoren
Dr. Thomas Bräuninger ist Professor für Politische Ökonomie an der Universität Mannheim.
Dr. Marc Debus ist Professor für Vergleichende Regierungslehre an der Universität Mannheim.
Dr. Jochen Müller ist Inhaber der Juniorprofessur für Politische Soziologie an der Universität Greifswald.
Dr. Christian Stecker ist Research Fellow und Projektleiter am Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung der Universität Mannheim.
Parties should develop a consistent issue profile during an electoral campaign. Yet, manifestos, which form the baseline for a party's programmatic goals in the upcoming legislative period, are usually published months before Election Day. We argue that parties must emphasize policy issues that are of key relevance to their likely voters in the last weeks of the election campaign, in which an increasing share of citizens make up their minds in terms of which party they will choose. To test this notion empirically, we draw on a novel data set that covers information on party representatives' statements made during the final weeks of an election campaign in nine European countries. Focusing on the campaign messages of social democratic and socialist parties, we find that these parties indeed intensify their emphasis of unemployment policy, which is a salient issue for their core voter clienteles, particularly in times of economic hardship.
Die globalen Migrationsströme haben Wahlverhalten, Parteiensysteme und Parteienwettbewerb in Europa und Deutschland drastisch verändert. In Folge des Zustroms von Flüchtlingen im Spätsommer und Herbst 2015 erstarkte die zuvor geschwächte „Alternative für Deutschland“ (AfD) und zog seitdem nicht nur in alle Landesparlamente, sondern auch in den Bundestag mit größtenteils zweistelligen Ergebnissen ein. Jedoch gibt es große Unterschiede in der regionalen Stärke der AfD bei Wahlen. Wir beleuchten in diesem Beitrag – vor dem Hintergrund insbesondere der Bedrohungstheorie, dem Halo-Effekt sowie der Literatur zum retrospektiven Wählen und zu den räumlichen Kontextfaktoren von Einstellungen und Verhalten – die Effekte der Standorte von Flüchtlingsunterkünften, der Grenznähe und der sozioökonomischen Struktur von Städten und Gemeinden in Bayern auf die Veränderung des Stimmenanteils der AfD zwischen den Bundestagswahlen 2013 und 2017. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass Flüchtlingsunterkünfte insbesondere in kleinen, ländlichen Gegenden mit größeren Stimmengewinnen für die AfD bei der Bundestagswahl 2017 einhergehen, insbesondere im Kontext sozioökonomischer Deprivation und in Gegenden, in denen bei früheren Wahlen rechtsextreme Parteien erfolgreich waren.
Die Kurzanalyse berichtet die Ergebnisse einer Expertenumfrage zur programmatischen Ausrichtung der deutschen Parteien im Herbst 2017. Online befragt wurden 93 Politikwissenschaftlerinnen und Politikwissenschaftler. Erhoben wurden die Positionen von acht Parteien auf sechs sachpolitischen Dimensionen sowie die Wichtigkeit dieser Themenbereiche für die Parteien. Im vorliegenden Beitrag prüfen wir zunächst die Reliabilität des Messinstruments und vergleichen dann die Wichtigkeit der Themenbereiche. Neben der Wirtschaftspolitik wird insbesondere die Zuwanderungspolitik als besonders wichtig eingestuft. Hingegen verlieren, im Vergleich zu früheren Umfragen, die Gesellschaftspolitik und die Umweltpolitik an Bedeutung. Die Positionen der etablierten Parteien sind konsistent mit der Erwartung eines mehrdimensionalen Politikraums, in welchem die Freien Demokraten (FDP) eine wirtschaftsliberale (rechte) Position in der Wirtschafts-und Umweltpolitik und eine progressive (linke) Position in der Gesellschaftspolitik einnehmen. Die Daten erlauben auch eine Einordnung der im 19. Bundestag erstmals vertretenen Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) nach deren Spaltung im Frühsommer 2015. Die AfD wird von den Experten auf allen Dimensionen als rechtskonservative Partei wahrgenommen wird. Fragebogen und Daten werden online zur Verfügung gestellt (Harvard Dataverse, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/22BGVU), Durchschnittswerte der ermittelten Parteipositionen und parteispezifischen Salienzen der berücksichtigten Politikdimensionen finden sich im Anhang zu diesem Beitrag.
The process of coalition formation following the 2017 Bundestag election was the most difficult in German post-war history. For the first time Germany saw negotiations fail, a minority government being discussed as a real possibility, and the federal president involved as formateur in coalition politics. The aim of this contribution is to explain why government formation was so intricate after the 2017 election. To this end, we trace patterns of party politics and the development of the German party system since 2013. We then study general patterns of government formation at the regional and national levels since the 1990s and evaluate whether these have changed with the advent of the right-wing populist party, Alternative for Germany. Our analysis of the 2017–18 government formation process is based on a novel expert survey of the policy profiles of German parties on various issue dimensions, conducted in 2017. The results show that the continuation of the incumbent coalition government of Christian and Social Democrats was the most likely outcome, and that the Social Democrats were indeed able to enforce a surpassing share of their policy positions in the final negotiation rounds.
Der Grad der Übereinstimmung zwischen den Politikangeboten der Parteien und der Politiknachfrage der Wählerinnen und Wähler bietet den Wählern Kriterien für die Wahlentscheidung und den Parteien Anhaltspunkte für ihren Wettbewerb um Wählerstimmen. Diese Übereinstimmung wird in der empirischen Wählerforschung mit ideologischen Skalen wie Links-Rechts oder mit Policy-Skalen zu wichtigen Themen der politischen Auseinandersetzung gemessen. Wenn Befragte über die Positionen der einzelnen Parteien auf den vorgegebenen Skalen urteilen und Angaben über ihren eigenen Standpunkt machen, besteht die Gefahr von Urteilsverzerrungen. Befragte neigen dazu, die Position von Parteien, die sie wertschätzen, näher an sich heranzurücken (Assimilationseffekt) und die Distanz zu den anderen Parteien zu überschätzen (Kontrasteffekt). Parteien benötigen für ihre Planung aber Positionsschätzungen, über die in der Wählerschaft große Urteilskonkordanz besteht. Die Mittelwerte sind als Positionsschätzer ungeeignet, da sie von gleichem Skalengebrauch der Befragten ohne Berücksichtigung des differential item functioning ausgehen. Wir wenden ein bayesianisches faktoranalytisches Messverfahren an, das aus den Befragtenangaben zu den Parteipositionen „wahre“ Positionen berechnet, die für die Befragten als „gleich wahrgenommen“ interpretiert werden. Wir demonstrieren das Verfahren mit den im Vorwahlquerschnitt der GLES abgefragten Skalen: Links-Rechts, sozialstaatliche Leistungen versus Steuern/Abgaben, Einwanderungspolitik und Klimaschutz. Die ursprünglichen Skalenangaben werden unter Annahme eines linearen Zusammenhangs in die „wahren“ Parteiwerte umgerechnet und die eigene Einstellung der Befragten wird mit den bei der Parteienwahrnehmung gewonnenen Koeffizienten an die gemeinsame Parteiskala angepasst. Die Häufigkeitsverteilungen der auf diese Weise erhaltenen Wähleridealpunkte fassen zusammen mit den entsprechenden Parteiwerten die zentralen Informationen zur Charakterisierung und Anwendung räumlicher Modelle des Parteienwettbewerbs zusammen.
Studies show that globalisation creates political potentials that can transform electoral competition in Western societies. The specific process of how these potentials become effective is not completely understood. It is argued in the article that attention-grabbing events can trigger the transformation of electoral competition as they force actors to take clear positions and thereby allow citizens to align their partisan preferences and policy attitudes. The article analyses the case of German parties’ reaction to the arrival of large numbers of refugees at Europe’s borders in 2015/16. Using panel data that bracket this event, it is shown how German citizens responded to party behaviour by changing partisan preferences on the basis of prior immigration attitudes. The so-called refugee crisis may thus have been a critical juncture transforming party competition in Germany. As such, the crisis represents a striking example of how events may focus attention on a new policy dimension and catalyse the evolution of new cleavages.
Why do some government formation periods end after a few days, while others last for several weeks or even months? Despite the rich literature on government formation, surprisingly little is known about the underlying bargaining processes. This article introduces a new dataset on 303 bargaining attempts in nineteen European democracies to analyse the duration of individual bargaining rounds. The study hypothesizes that (1) preference tangentiality, (2) ideological proximity, (3) incumbency and (4) party leadership tenure decrease the duration of coalition bargaining. Employing a copula approach to account for the non-random selection process of the observations, it shows that these actor-specific factors matter in addition to systemic context factors such as post-election bargaining and party system complexity. These findings highlight the need to consider both actor-specific and systemic factors of the bargaining context to explain government formation.
When the reform of German federalism was enacted in 2006, the right of the second chamber, Bundesrat, to veto large parts of national legislation had long been identified as a dysfunctional element of the federal system. The need to compromise with an often opposition-controlled Bundesrat was perceived as hurting democratic principles and worsening Germany’s policy performance. Hence, a variety of constitutional amendments was adopted in 2006 to curb the veto threat. This paper sketches how the expansion of the Bundesrat veto emerged and how the reform tried to reduce it. Covering all federal legislation between 1978 and 2016 this paper then analyses the actual effects of the reform. It is shown that the veto threat has been reduced by around 17% but that it remains unchanged at around 65% in the area of tax law.
Die neunziger Jahre brachten erhebliche Veränderungen für die politischen Kräfteverhältnisse in Belgien und den Niederlanden mit sich. So erhielt die bis dahin stärkste Partei der Niederlande, die Christen Demokratisch Appel (CDA), bei den Wahlen von 1994 lediglich 22,4 Prozent der Wählerstimmen, was einen Verlust von mehr als 13 Prozentpunkten gegenüber dem Ergebnis von 1989 bedeutete. In der Konsequenz kam es erstmalig zur Bildung einer Koalition ohne die CDA. Fünf Jahre später erlebte die belgische Christdemokratie eine ähnliche Niederlage. Auch sie war infolge des für sie unerfreulichen Wahlergebnisses von lediglich 20 Prozent der Stimmen zum ersten Mal seit 1958 nicht an der Regierungskoalition beteiligt1. Für Belgien und die Niederlande kommen diese Veränderungen einem Bruch mit der Vergangenheit gleich, da beide Länder bis dahin als typische Beispiele für die auf der Integration der politischen Hauptströmungen durch Koalitionsbildung beruhende Konkordanzdemokratie (consociational democracy) galten.2
Parties often tailor their campaign message differently to different groups of voters with the goal of appealing to a broader electorate with diverse preferences and thereby winning their votes. I argue that the strategy helps a party win votes if it can convince diverse groups of voters that the party is ideologically closer to their preferred positions. Using election data from nine Western European democracies, I first show that parties gain votes when they appeal broadly. Analysis of individual-level survey data suggests that voters perceive broadly appealing parties as ideologically closer to their own positions, a finding that identifies a plausible mechanism behind the aggregate positive effect of this strategy on party election performance. These findings not only help explain the behavior of some European parties, but they may also offer a potential recipe for electoral success in multiparty democracies.
. Coalition theory has provided political scientists interested in cabinets in West European multiparty democracies with interesting theoretical concepts. These concepts have been applied on their own, in connection with other theoretical approaches but also in descriptively oriented empirical research. Both large scale cross-national and country specific analyses have been conducted. In this article I will examine the importance of the recently developed concepts of dominant and central players for cabinets in the Netherlands (1918–1990). I will show that especially the concept of the central player has important applications.
Studies on coalition formation assume that political parties have two major goals: they aim to maximise office and policy payoffs. This paper shows that decision-making in the government formation game is also determined by the voters’ coalition preferences. Since the coalition formation process is not a one-shot game, parties have to take the coalition preferences of the electorate into account when they evaluate the utility of potential coalitions. If parties fail to comply with the coalition preferences of voters, they are likely to be penalised in future elections. The argument is tested by an analysis of government formation in the 16 German states between 1990 and 2009. The results support the argument: the formation of coalitions – at least in the German states – is not only determined by office- and policy-seeking behaviour of political parties, but also by the preferences of voters regarding their preferred outcome of the coalition game.
Zusammenfassung Das Wahlverhalten kann durch eine Reihe von Faktoren beeinflusst werden. Dazu zhlen die Zugehrigkeit eines Whlers zu bestimmten
sozialen Gruppen oder eine subjektiv empfundene Nhe zu einer Partei in Form einer Parteiidentifikation. Zwei weitere mgliche
Annahmen sind inhaltlicher Natur: Whler sollten sich fr die Partei entscheiden, die ihnen programmatisch am nchsten steht
oder von der sie erwarten, dass sie die wichtigsten Probleme am besten lsen kann. Des Weiteren kann die Wahlentscheidung
auch von der Kandidatenprferenz abhngen. Auch die wahrgenommene wirtschaftliche Lage kann das Wahlverhalten beeinflussen.
In diesem Beitrag wird gezeigt, dass in Deutschland Parteiidentifikation, Problemlsungskompetenz, sozialstrukturelle Merkmale
und auch die Kanzlerprferenz einen entscheidenden Einfluss auf das Wahlverhalten ausben. Die Analyse basiert auf dem Modell
von Adams, Merrill und Grofman (2005) und verwendet die Daten der Deutschen Nationalen Wahlstudien von 1987, 1998 und 2002.
In der Praxis parlamentarischer Demokratien sind Koalitionen Parteienbündnisse zur Bildung und Unterstützung einer Regierung
im Amt (Oberreuter 1987: 426). Nur etwa 13 Prozent aller Kabinette in den parlamentarischen und semi-präsidentiellen Regierungssystemen
Europas zwischen 1945 und 2003 waren Regierungen, in denen eine einzige Regierungspartei eine absolute Mehrheit der Parlamentssitze
kontrollierte. Nahezu sechs von zehn Regierungen stützten sich auf formale Koalitionen mindestens zweier Parteien. Weitere
elf Prozent aller Regierungen waren Koalitionen ohne eigene absolute Mehrheit im Parlament. Schließlich stellten etwa ein
Sechstel aller Regierungen Minderheitsregierungen einer einzigen Partei dar. Insgesamt waren daher rund fünf Sechstel aller
demokratischen Regierungen Europas auf die formalisierte oder auch informelle Kooperation mindestens zweier Parteien angewiesen
(Gallagher/Laver/Mair 2006: 401). Bildung, Bestand und Governance von Koalitionen sind zentrale Elemente des Regierens im Allgemeinen und des Verhältnisses von Legislative und Exekutive in
parlamentarischen Demokratien im Besonderen. Damit betreffen sie zentrale Bereiche der politikwissenschaftlichen Arbeit Wolfgang
Ismayrs.
Prozesse der Regierungsbildung haben in Folge der parlamentarischen Etablierung der Linken in Ost- wie Westdeutschland seit
der Bundestagswahl 2005 eine neue Form von Dynamik auf Ebene der Länder als auch bundesweit erfahren. So ist die Wahrscheinlichkeit
deutlich gesunken, dass einer der beiden „Koalitionsblöcke“ – das „bürgerliche Lager“ aus Christdemokraten (CDU), Christsozialen
(CSU) und Freien Demokraten (FDP) auf der einen und ein „rot-grünes“ Bündnis aus Sozialdemokraten (SPD) und Bündnis 90/Die
Grünen auf der anderen Seite – eine parlamentarische Mehrheit erreicht. Bedingt durch die Festlegung auf bestimmte Bündnisse
als präferierte Koalitionsregierungen und vor allem aufgrund des Ausschlusses einzelner Parteien als möglicher Regierungspartner
kann es zu nicht auflösbaren Blockaden im Regierungsbildungsprozess kommen (Decker 2009a; Decker/Best 2010), die entweder
zu vorzeitigen Neuwahlen des Parlaments oder der Nicht-Einhaltung von Koalitionsaussagen gegenüber den Wählern und Parteimitgliedern
führen können. Insbesondere die hessische Landtagswahl vom Januar 2008 hat die Konsequenzen, die sich aus der Kombination
des Fünfparteiensystems im Parlament mit den positiv wie negativ formulierten Koalitionsaussagen ergeben, deutlich gemacht
(Schmitt-Beck/Faas 2009a, 2009b). Trotz der Gefahr, dass eine ähnliche Situation wie in Hessen 2008 auch auf Bundesebene nach
den Wahlen vom September 2009 entstehen könnte, haben Union, SPD, FDP und Grüne dennoch Koalitionsaussagen derart getätigt,
die eine Reihe von Parteienkombinationen von vorneherein ausschlossen.
1. Modeling party competition 2. How voters decide: the components of the unified theory of voting 3. Linking voter choice to party strategies: illustrating the role of non-policy factors 4. Factors influencing the link between party strategy and the variables 5. Policy competition under the unified theory: empirical applications to the 1988 French Presidential Election 6. Policy competition under the unified voting model: empirical applications to the 1989 Norwegian parliamentary election 7. The threat of abstention: candidate strategies and policy representation in US presidential elections 8. Candidate strategies with voter abstention in US presidential elections: 1980, 1984, 1988, 1996, and 2000 9. Policy competition in Britain: the 1997 general election 10. The consequences of voter projection: assimilation and contrast effects 11. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: theory 12. Policy-seeking motivations of parties in two-party elections: empirical analysis 13. Concluding remarks.
Coalition theory typically treats political parties involved in government formation in parliamentary democracies as if they were unconstrained players in an institution-free world. Yet actual coalition options are often severely constrained by institutional arrangements and prior commitments. We develop a systematic account of different constraints on government formation and examine their frequency across 10 parliamentary democracies. Hypothetical and empirical examples demonstrate how a small number of constraints can dramatically reduce the range of coalition options and redistribute bargaining power among political parties. More adequate coalition theories need to recognize the effects of such constraints and to build on the theoretical lessons of the neoinstitutionalist approach to legislative behavior.
Series editors' preface Acknowledgements Part I. The Context: 1. Theory, institutions, and government formation 2. The social context of government formation 3. The government formation process Part II. The Model: 4. Government equilibrium 5. Strong parties Part III. Empirical Investigations: 6. Two cases: Germany, 1987 Ireland, 1992-3 7. Theoretical implications, data, and operationalization 8. Exploring the model: a comparative perspective 9. A multivariate investigation of portfolio allocation Part IV. Applications, Extensions, and Conclusions: 10. Party systems and cabinet stability 11. Making the model more realistic 12. Party politics and administrative reform 13. Governments and parliaments Bibliography.
This article theorizes and analyzes two aspects of government building in the German states while paying special attention to interrelations between the federal and state level. First, we examine which factors influence the choice of the partisan composition of the next government. Secondly, we ask for the determinants of the policy positions of the newly formed coalition governments. Original empirical results show that both government formation and policy formulation in the German Länder are clearly affected by federal politics. State-level coalitions cross-cutting the federal government–opposition divide are avoided, and the strength of this effect depends on institutional context and the federal election cycle. The policy position of state-level governments is affected by the position of the respective federal government. On the economic policy dimension, all state-level governments move towards the federal government. On the social policy dimension, those state governments whose partisan composition is congruent with the federal government seem to move away from the latter.
Political parties that wish to exercise executive power in parliamentary democracies are typically forced to enter some form of coalition. Parties can either form a pre-electoral coalition prior to election or they can compete independently and form a government coalition afterwards. While there is a vast literature on government coalitions, little is known about pre-electoral coalitions. A systematic analysis of these coalitions using a new dataset constructed by the author and presented here contains information on all potential pre-electoral coalition dyads in twenty industrialized parliamentary democracies from 1946 to 1998. Pre-electoral coalitions are more likely to form between ideologically compatible parties. They are also more likely to form when the expected coalition size is large (but not too large) and the potential coalition partners are similar in size. Finally, they are more likely to form if the party system is ideologically polarized and the electoral rules are disproportional.
Political parties in established democracies face a trade-off between changing their policy positions in pursuit of votes and adhering to their previous positions in order to reduce risks related to change. To reconcile this trade-off, parties seek information about public opinion. Past election performance is one such source of information. To date however, there is no consistent result on whether past elections affect party positioning. I highlight two factors that previous analysts have not considered: whether past election results affect the magnitude of parties’ policy shifts in the current election, and how the time elapsed since the last election moderates the relationship between past election results and party policy change. My analyses of 23 established democracies generate two conclusions with important implications for understanding party behavior and political representation: parties tend to shift their policies more when they have lost votes in the previous election than when they have gained votes; and the effect of past election results dissipates with the passage of time.
Although spatial theory posits that political parties adjust their policies in response to rival parties’ policy strategies, there is little comparative research that evaluates this hypothesis. Using the Comparative Manifesto Project data, we analyse the relationship between parties’ policy programmes and the policies of their opponents in twenty-five post-war democracies. The authors conclude that parties tended to shift their policy positions in the same direction that their opponents had shifted their policies at the previous election; furthermore, parties were particularly responsive to policy shifts by other members of their ‘ideological families’, i.e. leftist parties responded to other leftist parties while right-wing parties responded to right-wing parties. Their findings have important implications for spatial models of elections, for the dynamics of party systems and for political representation.
Many previous theoretical analyses of multiparty coalition behaviour have been based either on a one-dimensional policy model or on a constant-sum game interpretation. For theoretical and empirical reasons this paper focusses on a competitive two-dimensional model. In this model parties are concerned with policy outcomes but choose party positions both with a view to electoral consequences and as a basis for coalition bargaining. The political heart is proposed as the set of possible coalition outcomes. The heart is either the core of the political game or is determined by a small number of party positions. Under certain conditions an equilibrium in the choice of party positions can be shown to exist. The model suggests that parties can be categorized as either strong or weak core parties, anti-core parties or peripheral parties. This categorization of parties implies a typology of party systems, which gives some theoretical foundation for the occurrence of minority, minimal winning and surplus coalitions in many of the European countries in the postwar period.
for helpful advice relating to the statistical analyses reported in this pa-per. We also thank three anonymous referees for very detailed and thoughtful comments. All remaining errors are the authors' sole responsibility.
Since 2005 all five parliamentary parties in the German Bundestag have coalition potential in the sense that they are able to enter at least one minimal winning coalition, that is a coalition without parties which are not necessary for a majority. Given the number of each party's members of parliament, the strategic coalition situation is fixed as the set of possible minimal winning coalitions. With certain assumptions (no party will gain an absolute majority, the party system consists of two larger and three smaller parties etc.) two strategic coalition situations are possible as a consequence of the Bundestag election in September 2009: the same as the existing one where only CDU/CSU and SPD can form a two party majority government, and an alternative, predicted currently (February/March 2009) by pollsters, where the largest party, probably the CDU/CSU, can form a two party majority coalition also with the third largest party, probably the FDP. In addition, several three party coalitions are also possible. Which of these coalitions will actually be formed will be determined by the policy distances between the parties which are identified in a two dimensional policy space (economic and social issue positions of parties). The possible minimal winning coalitions are further constrained by the majority coalitions in the socalled cycle set as defined by Schofield.