German Voters in Times of Crisis: The Impact of Perceptions and Economic Context on Electoral Behaviour

This paper analyses the connection between economic context, voters’ individual assessment of the economy, and party identification, taking the German national elections of 2009 as an example. Based on the results of multinomial and multilevel regression models, the article shows that partisanship moderates how the economy affects the vote. In cases of increasing unemployment in the constituency, voters are less likely to vote for the Social Democrats instead of the CDU and the opposition. This effect is particularly strong amongst voters who report that they identify with the Social Democrats. Regarding the effect of voters’ assessment of the national economy, the results are different. In this case, a better evaluation of the regional economy increases the probability to vote for right-wing parties – notably amongst voters without partisanship. These findings suggest that the moderating effect of partisanship on the economy’s impact on voting behaviour should not be overestimated. What is more, this analysis implies that research on economic voting should always account for both contextual factors and voters’ personal assessment of the economy, as these measures reveal different dimensions of economic voting.     

Yet Another Case of Electoral and Government Epidemic? The Turkish Cypriot Legislative Election of January 2018

Following Bosco and Verney’s analyses of ‘electoral’ and ‘government epidemics’, the 2018 Turkish Cypriot legislative election is examined in the context of the impact of the economic crisis on elections and government formation in southern Europe. Despite its obvious idiosyncrasies as a self-declared state with 335,000 inhabitants, in the last decade of economic crisis and austerity policies, the Turkish Cypriot case has followed a largely similar pattern to other southern European countries: declining turnout; emergence of start-up parties; three consecutive early elections; a more fragmented parliament; sidelining of the biggest party in government formation; the first ever grand coalition; and, finally, an unprecedented four-party coalition bringing together parties from left, right, and centre.     

Reading Downs: New Labour and An Economic Theory of Democracy

In Downs' median voter theorem parties can only increase their vote by changing their policies and moving towards the electoral centre ground. This theorem has been used to sustain a particular and, I will argue, one-sided interpretation of New Labour's actions and political trajectory. There is more to An Economic Theory of Democracy than the median voter theorem. Downs argues that voters and parties operate in conditions of uncertainty and that this gives parties the opportunity to persuade voters to revise their beliefs. Parties can win elections not only by changing their policies but by changing voters' minds. Downs' arguments about persuasion can be used to generate an alternative and very different interpretation of New Labour.     

A Predictive Test of Voters' Economic Benchmarking: The 2013 German Bundestag Election

Do voters judge their national economy relative to economic performance abroad? In 2013 we took advantage of the German Bundestag election to test this hypothesis predictively. Nearly two months prior to the election, we published an election forecast relying on a theory-driven empirical model of election outcomes that draws on previous election outcomes; characteristics of the government and of voters; and, most originally, the relative economic performance of Germany (‘benchmarked' growth) in comparison to the three other most important economies in Europe – France, the UK and Italy. Our forecast put the outgoing coalition government of CDU/CSU and FDP at 47.05 per cent of the popular vote deviating from the actual outcome of 46.3 by 0.75 points. This makes our forecast one of the most accurate in this election cycle. Despite one-and-a-half months of lead time, our forecast performed on par or slightly better than the last poll results issued only two days before the election.     

The Ambiguity of Veto Power in Coalitions: German Liberals' Role as a Watchdog in Justice and Home Affairs and their Failure to Sell Stalemate as Success in the Federal Elections of 2013

The article demonstrates that the rigid use of veto capacity in coalitions causes risks for re-election. Justice was a high-salience domain of the German Liberal Democratic Party (FDP), which occupied this portfolio in its coalition with the Conservative majority in the federal legislative period from 2009 to 2013. By analysing several legislative projects the article shows that their contents or non-adoption were an effect of liberals' vetoes. This policy-seeking strategy provoked conflicts within the coalition and stalemate making it impossible to realise popular measures that would have enhanced the Liberals' reputation and the importance of the domain for the voters who were mainly interested in economic and social policy. Moreover, the Liberals' vetoes led to a loss of support from its major coalition partner in the pre-election campaign. Thus governmental parties have to trade off policy and vote-seeking goals in order to get re-elected.     

Leader Effects and Voting for the Populist Radical Right in Western Europe

Charismatic leaders are often assumed to drive the electoral success of populist radical right parties. Yet, little attention is given to how voter evaluations of leaders influence individual voting behavior. To our knowledge, no systematic and comparative tests of this empirical question exist. In this paper, we test to what extent voters’ support for populist radical right parties is fueled by leaders' appreciation. In order to examine leader effects on the populist radical right vote, we rely on an original dataset pooling 29 National Election Studies from ten established West European parliamentary democracies (1985‐2018). Our analysis finds that: (1) voters’ evaluation of party leaders is significantly associated with voting for populist radical right parties; (2) leader evaluations are more important than left‐right self‐placement when it comes to voting for the populist radical right, and (3) leader effects are more important for populist radical right voters than for other voters.     

The politics of national‐populism: Ideology and policies of the German Republikaner party

In this article, the Republikaner party's ideology and policies are explored on the basis of programmes and other public statements. There will be an emphasis on economic policies and issues of national and ethnic identity. It will be argued that the Republikaner party is targeting a broader electoral coalition than its main competitors and predecessors on the extreme right. In its attempt to mobilise a broad and heterogeneous protest coalition and to attract voters beyond the narrow confines of traditional right‐wing extremism the party makes contradictory promises to various sectional groups without being able to integrate them into a consistent framework of economic policy. These contradictions are covered up by the party's radical nationalism, extreme xenophobia and populist propaganda.     

So Close But So Far: Voting Propensity and Party Choice for Left‐Wing Parties

While the bulk of the literature focuses on the vote for parties from different blocs, the purpose of our article is to study the vote for two parties that are ideologically very close to each other: The Social Democrats and the Greens in Switzerland. To that end, we develop a two‐step model, where voters first make a selection of parties that are acceptable to them and then make their electoral choice out of this set of acceptable alternatives. We use voting propensities as a measure of the first, consideration step and we show that they strongly depend on the distance between voters and parties on the Left–Right scale. With regard to the second, choice stage of the electoral process we hypothesize about the factors that may account for the varying ability of the two parties to convert potential voters into real voters. Our empirical tests provide encouraging support for our hypotheses regarding the impact of socio‐demographic variables and issue voting. Strategic considerations, by contrast, do not seem to matter.     

‘Sowing the Seeds of Love’? Determinants of Local Coalition Formation and Termination between the CDU and the Greens, 1994–2016

Drawing on empirical evidence from 11 CDU–Green coalitions in large German municipalities, this article investigates the determinants of formation and termination of black–green minimal winning coalitions. Such coalitions are likely to be formed if the mayor is a party member of either the CDU or the Greens, if one of the two parties dominates the local party system, and if the SPD suffers from severe vote losses. Furthermore, the results indicate that CDU–Green coalitions are primarily formed if neither the CDU nor the Greens have gained a parliamentary majority with their ‘usual’ coalition partners. Ideological connectivity, however, does not play a major role. Regarding coalition stability, Christian Democrats and Greens are able to govern successfully for an entire legislative term in most of the cases. If a coalition is terminated early, however, this is due to a party breaking the coalition agreement by voting on specific policies together with the SPD in the local council.     

Past the saturation point: Why voters switch from mainstream to niche parties and vice-versa

When do voters switch from mainstream to niche parties and vice-versa? To understand these switches, we focus on the saturation of the party system. We theorize that when a party system is oversaturated – i.e. when a higher effective number of parties contests elections than predicted based on socio-political contextual characteristics (the system's ‘carrying capacity’) – it becomes increasingly likely that: (1) mainstream party voters defect to niche parties; and (2) niche party voters refrain from switching to mainstream parties. Based on vote-switching patterns in 15 countries and 53 elections, we find that oversaturation increases shifts from mainstream to niche parties. Further analyses show that this holds for shifts from mainstream to radical left and right parties, but not for shifts to green parties. This has important consequences for research on vote switching, the electoral consequences of policy differentiation and the competition between niche and mainstream parties.     

Party competition in the Middle East: spatial competition in the post-Arab Spring era

This paper charts the nature of political cleavage between major parties in post-Arab Spring elections in five Mediterranean region countries, with data from online opt-in surveys. We compare the Moroccan elections, held under a consolidated authoritarian regime, with the transitional cases of Tunisia and Egypt as well as the more mature democracies of Turkey and Israel. Voter opinions are obtained on 30 salient issues, and parties and voters are aligned along two dimensions. We trace country-specific cleavage patterns and reflections of party system maturity in these five countries. The cases of Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco reveal that in less settled cleavage structures there is little congruence between vote propensities for parties and agreement levels with policy positions compared to the more institutionalized democracies of Israel and Turkey where voters exhibit a higher likelihood to vote for a party as the distance between the voter and the party in the policy space gets smaller.     

From ‘Dream Team’ to ‘Marriage of Convenience’? An Introduction

This introduction connects some of the main themes covered in this special issue on Chancellor Merkel's second coalition cabinet, which was formed in October 2009 and ended with the electoral collapse of the FDP in the Bundestag election of September 2013. It starts by setting out an interesting ‘puzzle’: the parties forming the coalition of 2009–2013 (CDU, CSU and FDP) had expressed a strong preference for this coalition in the run-up to the election of 2009. Despite their seeming agreement in many policy areas, the coalition formed in 2009 faced tough negotiations and conflicts between the parties from the beginning. The economic crisis the preceding government faced between 2005 and 2009 and unforeseen events during the course of the CDU/CSU–FDP coalition 2009–2013 (e.g. the Euro crisis and the Fukushima environmental disaster) had altered the policy agenda in important ways and rendered the former ‘Christian–Liberal reform project’ obsolete.     

The Concertación's Defeat in Chile's 2009–2010 Presidential Elections

The Concertación lost the recent presidential elections in Chile after 20 years in office. This article proposes three explanations for this result. First, the Concertación's candidate selection process through primaries was exclusionary, without opening up participation to all potential applicants. This combined with a deep erosion of the coalition, reflected in the resignation of deputies and senators from parties that compose it. The process was accelerated with the emergence of an independent candidate, formerly from the Concertación. Second, the candidate from the right increased his vote in the poorest sectors and expanded the right's constituency to middle‐class segments, traditional Concertación electoral strongholds. Third, the right achieved greater electoral consistency than the Concertación by reducing the number of voters who split their tickets. Its presidential candidate obtained almost the same percentage as its list of deputies.     

Kirchheimer Revisited: Party Polarisation,Party Convergence,or Party Decline in the German Party System

The 2005 German parliamentary elections produced two parties claiming victory, the inability to form a government, and Germany's second post-war grand coalition government. This article explores the peculiarities in the contemporary dynamic of the German party system. It considers the strategy and motivation of parties and the effect of party competition. A key focus is to revisit and evaluate the predictive power of Otto Kirchheimer's ‘end of ideology’ proposition in the German case. On the one hand, mainstream parties seem to be converging at the ideological centre across Western Europe. At the same time, some party polarisation within the party system is evident as more marginal parties such as those of the far left and far right have gained votes at the expense of the mainstream parties in recent elections. A third possibility is that both of these circumstances have produced a political void with voters becoming increasingly apathetic and non-ideological. This paper argues that in the aggregate, trends do not reflect the predictions of Kirchheimer.     

The Berlin Land Election 2006

This article examines the 2006 Berlin Land election, including the election campaigns of the main parties, the results, and the process of post-election coalition formation. While few doubted that the Social Democratic Party (SPD) would emerge as the largest party, and that the highly popular Klaus Wowereit would continue as Berlin's governing mayor; the big questions were what coalition he would lead and whether Berliners would vote for a continuation of the (initially controversial) red–red coalition comprising the SPD and the Left Party. Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS).     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Grand Coalition's Response to the Economic Crisis

The German grand coalition's track record with regard to managing the financial crisis is mixed. The government has spent enormous amounts of money to prevent a breakdown of the banking system and to cushion the effects of the recession. It was at least partially successful as these programmes indeed prevented collapses of banks as well as bank runs, kept unemployment relatively low and somewhat mitigated the recession. Nonetheless, at least some of the crisis policies lacked coherence, particularly with regard to the bank rescue packages. The reason is that even in the face of a systemic banking crisis and a GDP decline of 5 per cent, programmatic differences between the coalition partners have not disappeared and became manifest in government policies.     

Differing Effects of the Global Financial Crisis: Why Mexico Has Been Harder Hit than Other Large Latin American Countries

In this article, we argue that the economic and financial crisis that began in Mexico in 2008 has not been primarily caused by the US crisis that began in 2007, as many have argued. As we will show, years of misguided economic policies at the national level have been at the heart of the Mexican crisis. On the one hand, the dominance of foreign banks in the country's financial system and the minimal presence of the public banks have greatly limited the range of counter‐cyclical policy options available to authorities. On the other hand, in the face of the crisis, Mexico has continuously applied deflationary Washington Consensus policies that have deepened the economic contraction. This article will focus on Mexico's individual problems, which offer important lessons for other Latin American countries with a shared recent history of Washington Consensus policies.     

Politics in the Kurdish periphery: clan networks and local party strategies in a comparative perspective

Despite the return to violence and state repression in the Kurdish conflict, the ruling Adalet ve Kalk?nma Partisi (Justice and Development Party – AKP) has remained the only alternative to the Kurdish National Movement (KNM) for Turkey's Kurdish citizens. What local-level strategies did the AKP employ in Kurdish areas to reinforce its national-level appeal to Islamic values? Under what conditions did local vote-seeking strategies help the AKP to overcome its pro-Kurdish rivals at the ballot box? This article examines the politics of local coalition building in the periphery of the Kurdish landscape – Bingöl and Mu?. Despite their many similarities, the two cities voted for different political parties in national elections. This article examines how the AKP's local party organizations interacted with local authority structures, recruited influential local elites, and pursued new voters. The vitality of clan networks in parts of Bingöl enabled the AKP to build a reliable local coalition. The gradual weakening of clan networks in Mu? and their permeation by the KNM prevented a similar coalition. Instead, the parties of the KNM were able to take advantage of divided clan networks to win national electoral contests in the province.     

The German Lander and EU enlargement: Between apple pie and issue linkage

While the government parties had blamed the lingering burden of unification and the global economic crisis for the bulk of Germany's troubles in the 2002 election campaign, the topic of gridlock and policy reform is re-entering the agenda of German politics. From a scientific view, the analysis of Schröder's potential for policy change imposes some challenges. Germany needs reforms in many policy areas, in particular in the economic and societal domains. We present a new method to measure the positions of political parties on many issues. To identify the structural causes for German gridlock we apply the spatial model for legislative choice, which uncovers the room for manoeuvre. More precisely, we intend to show how much potential for policy change the Schröder government will have in economic, societal and foreign policy, and which policy position will be promoted by the Red–Green coalition in these areas.     

Welfare State Restructuring without Grand Coalitions: The Role of Informal Cooperation in Blame Avoidance

This article argues that welfare state restructuring, which is highly unpopular among voters, is politically feasible if government and opposition parties cooperate informally with one another. Contrary to what key arguments made in the literature assert, restructuring does not require the formation of a grand coalition to diffuse blame from voters. Informal cooperation between parties is a distinctive blame-avoiding strategy, which differs not only from other party-oriented strategies such as building a grand coalition, but also from voter-oriented ones, such as obfuscation and exemption. By analysing the politics of pension reform in Germany, this article shows that informal cooperation enables political parties to restructure the welfare state without running the risk of electoral failure.