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Analysis of the 2021 Bundestag elections. 2/4. Political spectrum

Tangian, Andranik S.

Abstract:

This is the second out of four papers devoted to the 2021 German federal elections continuing our anal-ysis of the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. This paper arranges the contesting parties into a ‘spectrum’ that reflects the spatial proximity of their policy profiles. The latter are 38-dimensional vectors of the parties’ answers to 38 policy questions from the 2021 Wahl-O-Mat, the German voting advice application (VAA). Applying Principal component analysis (PCA), we construct a contiguous party ordering where the neighboring parties have close policy profiles. The ordering fits to the left-right ideological axis rolled up in a circumference, which can be unfolded by splitting it at one of its largest gaps. Rigorously speaking, we obtain a horseshoe-shaped left-right axis with the far-left and far-right ends approaching each other. For comparisons, alternative party orderings are constructed using four other models. Finally, the 2013, 2017 and 2021 German political spectra are compared.


Volltext §
DOI: 10.5445/IR/1000143157
Veröffentlicht am 18.02.2022
Cover der Publikation
Zugehörige Institution(en) am KIT Institut für Volkswirtschaftslehre (ECON)
Publikationstyp Forschungsbericht/Preprint
Publikationsmonat/-jahr 01.2022
Sprache Englisch
Identifikator ISSN: 2190-9806
KITopen-ID: 1000143157
Verlag Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT)
Umfang ii, 39 S.
Serie Working paper series in economics ; 152
Schlagwörter Policy representation, representative democracy, political spectrum, left-right ideological axis
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