Voting Angry: An Exploratory Analysis of the Transformation of the German Party System

32 Pages·2012·1.09 MB·English

Voting Angry: An Exploratory Analysis of the
Transformation of the German Party System∗
Peter Haschke† Paulina A. Marek‡
December 2012
Abstract
Two arguments are considered to explain the increasing fragmentation of the German
party system following 30 years of party system stability. According to the first argu-
ment, disillusioned citizens register protest votes that are out of line with Downsian
expectations. Theincreaseinpartysystemfragmentationisthusseenasaconsequence
ofvoterdissatisfactionwith thepoliticalmainstream. Analternative holdsthatthe in-
creasing fragmentation is attributable to increasing heterogeneity of policy preferences
among labor. Being ignored by traditional social democratic parties, some segments
of labor as a consequence are driven towards new and extreme parties. Relying on
an analysis of recently published survey data, this paper finds strong support for the
former but not the latter argument.
∗We thank Dick Niemi, Curt Signorino, Kevin Clarke, Bonnie Meguid, Miguel R. Rueda, and Jonathan
P. Olmsted for helpful comments, suggestions, and discussion. All errors remain our own.
†PhD.Candidate,DepartmentofPoliticalScience,UniversityofRochester,HarknessHall333,Rochester,
NY 14627, email: [email protected]
‡Ph.DCandidate,DepartmentofPoliticalScience,UniversityofRochester,HarknessHall333,Rochester,
NY 14627, email: [email protected]
Following a period of stability which lasted from about the late 1950s through the 1970s,
the German party system underwent significant changes during the last 25 years. Beginning
with the emergence of the Green party in the 1980s and culminating with the consolidation
of the socialist Die Linke during the first decade of the 21st century, the dominance of the
center right Christian Democrats (CDU) and the center left Social Democrats (SPD), has
become increasingly tenuous. Whereas the party system of the first thirty years of post-war
democracyhasfrequentlybeendescribedasa“two-and-a-halfpartysystem”(seeforexample
Lijphart, 1999), true multi-partism has arrived, with vote shares of five parties exceeding 10
percent for the first time in Germany’s national elections in September of 2009.
Although scholars have devoted considerable effort to document and explain the rise of
Germany’s Green party, specifically (Kitschelt, 1989; Frankland, 1995), and the electoral
fortunes of niche parties, more generally (see for example Inglehart, 1990; Kitschelt, 1994,
1995;Meguid, 2008), theelectoralsuccess ofthenew socialistsinGermanyhas beena largely
ignored development. Thus whereas, niche and single-issue parties, as well as nationalist
and other parties of the far right, have received considerable scholarly and media attention,
developments on the far left of the political spectrum have attracted only little notice among
political scientists.1 Motivated by the arguably rather dramatic changes of the German
party system over the last 10 years, this paper attempts to shed some light on these recent
developments.
In particular, this paper evaluates two possible explanations for the rise of the socialist
Die Linke.2 Voters – according to the first explanation which I refer to as the protest
vote argument – are said to be increasingly disaffected with the way democracy operates.
Dissatisfied, especially, with the performance of the mainstream parties these individuals
then as a consequence vote for parties outside of the political mainstream as a sign of protest.
The recent electoral success of new political parties must thus be seen as an indicator of voter
1The attention given to leftist and socialist parties in the literature focusing on post-communist Eastern
Europe, constitutes an exception.
2The name Die Linke translates to The Left. In order to avoid confusion, especially when considering
partyorvoterpositionsontheideologicalspectrum,IrefertoTheLeftasDieLinke,throughoutthispaper.
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discontent. According to the second explanation – which borrowing from Rueda (2005, 2006)
I call the insider-outsider argument – the rise of new political parties can be understood as
the outcome of certain segments of labor responding to new strategies adopted by traditional
social democratic parties. Instead of being discontent with the performance of mainstream
politicalpartiesgenerally, itisthepoliciesadvocatedbysocialdemocraticpartiesspecifically,
that are to “blame” for the improving electoral fortunes of new parties.
As citizen preferences and opinions are key to both the protest vote argument and the
insider-outsider argument, this paper relies on recently updated survey data from 2011 to
show that only the protest vote argument appears to be supported by the data. The paper
is structured as follows. Before analyzing the data and estimating a set of multinomial vote-
choice models, a brief overview of the German party system is given to motivate the analysis.
The subsequent two sections describe the data and results of the empirical analysis. A final
section concludes.
Motivation and Background
In August of 1949, following the ratification of a provisional constitution (Grundgesetz or
Basic Law) in May, Germany held its first democratic national elections since the collapse of
the Weimar Republic. Of the ten parties winning seats to the Bundestag (the lower house),
the newly formed center right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), and its Bavarian sister
party, the Christian Social Union (CSU) combined, controlled about 34.6 percent of the
seats in the lower house, while the center left Social Democratic Party (SPD) held about
32.6 percent. As the third largest vote getter, the Free Democratic Party (FDP) was able
to secure another 12.9 percent of the seats. No other party was able to win more than 5
percent of the seats to the first Bundestag, and the three parties – the CDU/CSU (Union),
the SPD, and the FDP – came to dominate German politics for the next 30 years.3 Given
3TheCDUandCSUhaveanelectoralarrangementaccordingtowhichtheCDUagreesnottocampaign
andcompeteelectorallyinthestateofBavaria,whereastheCSUagreestocampaignandcompeteinBavaria
2
that in the history of the Second Republic no single party has been able to win a majority
of the seats to the legislature, all governments until 1998 thus consisted of at least two of
these three parties.
After the first election, and with the adoption of a nationally binding 5 percent electoral
threshold in 1953, the field of parties winning seats to the lower house declined (see: Figure
1). By 1961 the Union, the SPD, and the FDP remained as the only parties winning
seats to the legislature – both the Union and the SPD vying to become the largest party
in the legislature, and the FDP adopting the role of “king-maker” in coalition formation
bargaining.4
As evidenced by Figures 1 and 2, the emergence of the Green Party, which contested
nationally for the first time in the election of 1980, broke the monopoly of the Union, the
SPD, and the FDP on Bundestag seats beginning in 1983. According to Kitschelt (1994) the
emergence and consolidation of the Green Party can be attributed to a failure of the SPD
to adopt an appropriate and consistent electoral strategy. Kitschelt argues that the Social
Democrats, particularly under the SPD chancellorship of Helmut Schmidt in the 1970s, had
pursued a centripetal strategy of vote and office maximization (164). Having ignored its
vulnerability to electoral challenges arising from new competitors on the ideological left, the
Social Democratic party was unable to respond to growing “left-libertarian, feminist and
ecologist demands” (164). After the social democratic Schmidt government had fallen and
Helmut Kohl assumed the chancellorship, leading a coalition of the Union and the FDP, the
SPD over the next decade vacillated between electoral strategies. Initially, the party moved
sharply to the left to reclaim voters it had lost to the Greens. This oligopolistic strategy
to eliminate the Green threat, however, was abandoned quickly as the SPD adopted a vote-
maximizing centrist strategy for the 1987 campaign. Following the defeat at the ballot box,
only. As is convention, I will treat the two parties as one, referring to both of them combined as Union.
4Of the minor parties winning seats to the first Bundestag most dissolved, joined the Union, or failed
to cross the electoral threshold. Only the Communist Party (KPD) ran competitively but in 1956 the party
was declared unconstitutional and it was subsequently banned from electoral competition.
3
Figure 1: Parties in the Bundestag: 1949-2009
11.0

Total
es
arti 6.0
P
of
er 5.0
b
m Effective
u
N
4.0
3.5
3.0
2.5
2.0
0.0
1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 19691972 1976 19801983 19871990 1994 1998 20022005 2009
Election Year
Note: The height of a bar represents the number of parties winning seats in the
Bundestag each national election. Three independent members of the 1949 Bun-
destag are treated as one party. The solid line shows the corresponding effective
number of legislative parties for that election. Own computation based on data
taken from the website of the Federal Returning Officer (2009).
however, the party yet again shifted strategies attempting to compete with the governing
Union-FDP coalition by advocating more moderate redistributive policies, while at the same
time engaging the Greens directly through libertarian appeals. Although the the SPD was
able to regain some 600,000 votes from the Greens in the 1990 election, the Union-FDP
government won the election on a wave of popular support for the Kohl government which
had brought about unification with the East (Kitschelt, 1994, 166-167).
The 1990 election saw yet another party win seats in the Bundestag (see again Figure
1). The successor party of the communist East German Socialist Unity Party (SED), the
Die Linke, won seats due to relaxed threshold requirements.5 Despite failing to cross the 5
5Initially the SED successor party ran under the name Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). It later
4
Figure 2: Vote Shares by Party
4550 l l l l l l l l l l l
40 l
l
ote 35 l l
−V 30 l Right of Center
PR 25 l Parties
Percent of 1125050 l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l UFDniPon
0
1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 19691972 1976 19801983 19871990 1994 1998 20022005 2009
50
45 l
l l l
Vote 3450 l l l l l l l l l l Left of Center
R− 30 l l Parties
nt of P 2205 l SGPreDens
Perce 11505 l l l ll ll ll ll ll Die Linke
0 l l
1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1972 1976 1980 1983 1987 1990 1994 1998 2002 2005 2009
Election Year
Note: Displayed are the vote shares of all right of center parties (top panel) and all left of center
parties(bottompanel)whichhavewonseatstothelowerhousefollowingthefirstthreeconsolidating
elections. Thevotesharesreflecttheproportionalvote(Zweitstimme)only. Assuchthedatapoints
only approximate the seat shares of the parties in the legislature. Note, also, the solid black line
indicating the 5% electoral threshold. Vote shares are displayed for all elections contested by the
respective party. Data source: Federal Returning Officer (2009).
percent threshold, which again applied in 1994, the Die Linke, due to highly concentrated
support in the formerly East German states, was able to take advantage of Germany’s mixed
member proportional electoral system. Winning a plurality in several districts in Berlin, the
Die Linke was thus able to retain a presence in the Bundestag until the party finally crossed
the electoral threshold in 1998. Surprisingly, despite two leftist parties challenging the Social
Democrats on the left, the 1998 election resulted in the ouster of the center right Union-FDP
government. As a whole, parties traditionally considered left of center won more than 50%
of the popular vote, and having moved sharply to the right under the leadership of Gerhart
Schro¨der, the SPD, in coalition with the Green party, returned to the chancellory.
competed as Linkspartei/PDS (Left Party/PDS) before finally adopting the name Die Linke.
5
Importantly, however, the German party system, despite the entering of the Green Party
in 1983 and the Die Linke in 1990, remained surprisingly stable until 2005. As evidenced
in Figure 1, the effective number of legislative parties increased only slightly following the
addition of these two parties.6 With the 2005 election, however, the effective number of
parties increases rapidly to levels not seen since 1949, with the FDP, the Greens and Die
Linke achieving double digit vote totals.7 It is the purpose of this paper to evaluate two
competing hypotheses that could explain the decline of the Union and the SPD and the
increasing fragmentation of the German party system, and in particular the rise of Die
Linke.
Two Explanations
The proliferation of new parties in the electoral systems of the world since the 1960s has
spawnedavastliteratureattemptingtounderstandandexplainthesuccessofpartiesoutside
of the political mainstream. Attempts to explain the explosion of new parties (often referred
to as single issue or niche parties) can be grouped roughly into two broad categories – a
category of institutional explanations and a category of sociological explanations (see for
example: Meguid, 2008).
Proponents of the institutional approach have long argued that the institutional context
in which political actors operate, plays an integral part in influencing the behavior of both
voters and political elites. Electoral rules, state structure and governmental type have thus
been the primary focus of scholars in this vein. Building on work by Duverger (1954);
Lijphart(1994);Cox(1997), JackmanandVolpert(1996), forexample, stresstheimportance
of party-system factors, arguing that these factors can explain the success of new parties on
6The effective number of parties is calculated by dividing 1 by the sum of the ith party’s squared seat
share. It can be understood as a measure of the fractionalization of the party system, which discounts
extremely small parties.
7ThestandarddeviationoftheoftheeffectivenumberofpartiesoverthehistoryoftheSecondRepublic
(since the adoption of the 5% national threshold in 1953) is 0.45. The 2005 and 2009 elections produces an
increase of 0.64 and 0.53 effective parties respectively.
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the extreme right. They find, for instance, that the proportionality of election rules is
positively related to the likelihood of formation and electoral success of extremist parties.
Electoral disproportionality in electoral systems such as those with single-member districts
or those employing high electoral thresholds, undermine the success of these new parties by
raising the cost of entry (517).
The determinants of a parties electoral fortunes, according to the sociological approach,
are to be found in the salience of the issues advanced by the relevant parties. Proponents
of this approach thus point to the socio-economic and cultural particularities of the elec-
torate to explain the electoral success of new parties. Changing voter attitudes and values
are of critical importance to explanations of the success of Green Parties and new politi-
cal movements (Inglehart, 1990; Kitschelt, 1994). Research also suggests that the success
of radical right-wing parties is a direct consequence of socioeconomic conditions within a
country (Betz, 1993; Kitschelt, 1995). A common line of argument, for example, holds that
economic misfortune, in particular, high levels of unemployment, push the marginalized to
cast their votes for anti-system and radical right-wing parties (Betz, 1990; Swank and Betz,
2003; Golder, 2003; Givens, 2005).
Itshouldbeclearthattheinstitutionalapproachshouldbeoflimitedutilityinexplaining
the developments of the German party system in recent years. As argued above, institutional
factors have remained more or less constant throughout the history of the Second Republic.
Neither the state-structure nor governmental type have changed. The developments of the
party system since 2005 can thus not be attributed to increasing decentralization, or to a
shift from a presidential to a parliamentary system, as these factors remained constant. The
electoral rules, also have not changed significantly since the adoption of the the national 5
percent threshold for the 1953 election.8 A focus on the sociological approach is therefore
warranted.
8In the 1949 election a 5 percent threshold only was used only at the state level. The election of 1990
can perhaps be seen as an exception, as two thresholds were in place for this election. A party would gain
representation in the Bundestag if it crossed the 5 percent threshold in either the states of former West
Germany or in the former East German states.
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The Protest Vote Argument
The first explanation evaluated in this paper, I call the protest vote argument. According
to this argument, the electoral success of new parties in Germany’s recent elections can be
explained as consequence of voter dissatisfaction with the performance of the political estab-
lishment on the one hand, and disillusionment with the operation of democracy on the other.
This argument suggests that supporters of parties of the political mainstream have become
increasingly dissatisfied with the parties performance in addressing the problems and con-
cerns important to voters. Importantly, the disenchanted, do not have particularly extreme
policy demands. As a matter of fact, if the protest argument is correct, much of the support
for new parties – parties which as a group tend to advocate more extreme policy positions –
comes from voters who are ideologically moderate yet support these parties merely as a sign
of political protest. The protest vote argument yields the following testable hypotheses.
Hypothesis A1: If the protest voter argument is correct, all mainstream parties should be
more or less equally affected by desertion of dissatisfied voters. If only one of the mainstream
parties is abandoned in favor of non-mainstream alternatives, a party specific explanation is
preferable.
Hypothesis A2: All non-mainstream parties should benefit from protest voting. Again if
only one of the non-mainstream party attracts protest voters a party specific explanation
might be preferable.
Hypothesis A3: Lastly, and most importantly, protest voters are moderates. Rather
than supporting non-mainstream parties for their relatively more extreme platforms, protest
voters support these parties despite of their relatively extreme platforms. In a Downsian
sense, protest voters vote incorrectly (i.e. they do not vote for the party closest to them).
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The Insider-Outsider Argument
The second argument evaluated in this paper, borrows heavily from Rueda (2005, 2006).
Rueda’s work challenges the assumption that social democratic parties are monolithic de-
fenders of the working class. He claims that although most of the comparative economy
literature treats social democratic parties as champions of labor (see among others: Hi-
bbs (1977); Alesina, Roubini and Cohen (1999); also Bartels (2008)), this assumption is
no longer warranted. Specifically, the conventional division of voters into upscale groups,
those disproportionately affected by inflation, and labor, those disproportionatly affected by
unemployment is inappropriate.
Instead, labor itself must be disaggregated into two groups – insiders and outsiders. Fol-
lowing a period of economic growth and stability of the late 1960s combined with social
unrest and union activism in the early 1970s, “highly restrictive tenure and severance pay
arrangements” were accepted by firms in industrialized countries (Rueda, 2005, 63). As a
consequence, large segments of labor became relatively insulated from market fluctuations
and unemployment. Those segments that benefitted from these developments, and which
are thus more or less immune to labor demand shocks, Rueda calls “insiders”. At the same
time, however, many OECD countries experienced labor supply shocks following the Oil
Shock crises (63). Women entering the labor force, and “a general intensification of interna-
tional competition” thus lead to an increase of part-time work and temporary employment
contracts (63). Individuals that are more precariously employed and more affected by eco-
nomic fluctuations thus make up a second segment of labor, which Rueda calls “outsiders”.
Importantly therefore, insiders and outsiders, differ in terms of their vulnerability to un-
employment and labor cannot be conceptualized as a homogenous political actor. It follows
that social democratic parties face important choices, insofar as a broad focus on reduc-
ing unemployment will only benefit part of the parties’ traditional constituency. Whereas
outsiders are disproportionately interested in reducing unemployment, insiders are seen to
be more concerned with maintaining their job security, while securing other work related
9