Jumping political parties in Germany's state elections

In one of last year's post, I showed a neighbour-net for the parties competing in the national election based on political distances inferred from the Wahl-O-Mat questionnaire (A network of political parties competing for the 2017 Bundestag). But Germany is a federal state, and since then, there has been a state election in Lower Saxony, and soon there will be two in Bavaria and Hesse. This is a good opportunity to make some network-based comparisons.

It is important to note that there are many political parties in Germany, not just two or three major parties, as in most English-speaking countries. State parliaments can therefore be composed of quite different mixtures of these groups.

The questionnaire

The Wahl-O-Mat is a political information service provided by the BPB, the "Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung". A group of youngsters assisted by scientists puts together a questionnaire of political theses (bullet points), which is sent out to the political parties competing in an election. When participating, as most parties do, they can either choose "agree", "disagree" or "neutral" to each statement.

As a voter, you can fill in the same questionnaire, mark some of the questions as "high importance" (which will be weighted stronger), and then choose (up to) eight parties for your personal comparison. The result will be a bar chart, showing you the percentage of your personal overlap with each of the parties. The BPB usually provide this service for all federal and state elections.

The problem I always have with this approach is that you don't get any graphical summary information about how the parties agree or disagree with each other to start from. In the worst case scenario, you could have 75% overlap with each of two parties who disagree with each other for 50% of the bullet points!

A straightforward solution to this shortcoming is to: code the questionnaire as a ternary matrix (0 = "disagree", 1 = "neutral", 2 = "agree"), treat them as ordered characters and determine the mean pairwise (Hamming) distances, and then infer a Neighbor-net based on the resulting distance matrix.

This is shown in the first figure, where each labeled point is one of the political parties. The two political extremes are also labeled.

The neighbour-net for the 2017 federal election Wahl-O-Mat questionaire (original GWoN post from last year, for those interested in further comments, extrapolations, and infographics, see related posts on my Res.I.P blog). The red split denotes the outgoing and new coalition parties (Merkel's "centre-right" CDU/CSU + "centre-left" SPD, the social-democrats), the blue split the most natural minor coalition partner for the CDU/CSU since the Kohl era, the "centrist" liberals (FDP). For the yellow split, see here (in German, but there is a Google translate button).

Political Compasses (for orientation)

Another graphical approach is to use a "political compass", instead. The original can be found at The Political Compass. Parties or persons are placed along two absolute (in the case of the original) axes: an economic left-right x-axis and a social authoritarian-libertarian (in the classic, not US sense, i.e. socially liberal) y-axis. (I encourage everyone to do the test for themselves. I was not surprised to see where I stand in the compass, but others have been. But first do the test, before browsing The Political Compass' highly interesting pages.)

Here's how this looks like for the main German parties (currently six) that also got seat in the newly formed Bundestag, with some orientation points: (in)famous historical figures and the presidential run-offs in the U.S. (most of this blog's readers sit in the U.S.) and France (because I live there, but can't vote).

Overlay of several Political Compass assessments regarding the last major elections in the Germany, France and the U.S. Grey dots, (in)famous figures that shaped modern world; the main German parties are in full colours (all on the economic right, except for the Left Party, Die Linke, which is where social-democrats where in the 70s, when the European model of welfare states was fully implemented). The position of U.S. (both right-authoritharian) and French (relaxed choice between Hitler, fascism, and Friedman, neo-liberalism) presidential run-offs is provided for comparison.

In Lower Saxony the "Niedersächsiche Landeszentrale für politische Bildung", the state's analog of the BPB, hired a Dutch company to provide a compass ("Wahlkompass") linked to the Wahl-O-Mat questionnaire for the 2017 state parliament election.

After filling in the questionnaire, you would be placed in the relative, compass, too. Note that (possibly to avoid giving due credit to The Political Compass) the y-axis has been flipped and modified to "progressiv" (progressive) and "konservativ" (conservative). Another reason may be that classifying parties as authoritarian is a bit tricky for a state-funded German institution for historical reasons.

The red marker indicates an all-neutral voter. The placement is a relative one, hence no grid.

The relative positions of the liberals (FDP), the right-wing populists of the "Alternative for Germany" AfD (blue symbol at the bottom), the CDU, SPD and Left Party (Linke) all agree with The Political Compass' assessment of their federal-level counterparts. However, the Green Party is placed much closer to the Left Party on the social y-axis. This has two possible reasons:

1. The Political Compass bases its assessment on party programs and actual government politics, and the Greens are part of quite a few state governments, and are the major ruling party in Baden-Würrtemberg, Germany's economically strongest state.
2. There can be a difference between progressive and libertarian. The Greens are progressive by supporting e.g. equal rights for women or LGBT and other aspects of modern society, but aim to achieve these goals by imposing legislation, which is authoritarian. On the other hand, conservatism – keeping the status-quo – is mutually linked to authoritarian politics. Any social movement will change society, or challenge the status-quo, and hence needs to be constrained or suppressed.

Another difference to the Wahl-O-Mat is that – similar to the questionnaire of The Political Compass – the Lower Saxony Wahlkompass allows six possible answers to each bullet point: "totally disagree" (which I scored as "0"), "disagree" (1), "neutral" (2), "agree" (3), "totally agree" (4), and "No opinion" (?). The latter is a quite useful, and would be an useful add-on also to the Wahl-O-Mat, because there is a difference whether one is neutral on a matter (could live with it) or has no opinion on it (don't bother). The more refined scale also allows us to treat the answers as ordered multistate characters when inferring the distance matrix, resulting in a more resolved network.

This is shown in the next figure.

Neighbour-net based on the Niedersachsen Wahlkompass questionaire (full post, in German).

As you can see, the political-distance-based Neighbor-net splits graph captures the similarity of the political parties to each other quite well. Now the only thing left to do is to add yourself (as a voter or interested third party) to the matrix and then re-infer the Neighbor-net. The basic files to do so (NEXUS-formatted matrices) for this, upcoming (Bavaria, Hesse), and future elections can be found on figshare

Comparing different elections

As a federal state, Germany has a long tradition of within-party diversity. Most commonly known is that the "Schwesterparteien" (sister parties) CSU and CDU disagree in not a few points. The CSU is a Bavarian endemit, while the CDU covers rest of Germany, including the former East Germany — see also my post [in English] on German and French party genealogies after World War II). Hence, they are treated separately by The Political Compass for the 2017 election. The CSU is in general (much) less neo-liberal than the CDU (placed left of it), but (often) more authoritarian, cultivating conservative views. But neither is the CDU a homogeneous formation when compared from state to state, nor are any of the other parties. The following splits graphs, based on the various Wahl-O-Mat questionnaires, illustrate this quite well.

Let's start with the upcoming state elections in Bavaria and Hesse. Here are the two Neighbor-nets.

Reduced Neighbour-nets for Bavaria and Hesse. Parties competing only in one of the states not included.

We note that some parties keep their position relative to each other. For example, the most severe political antagonists in both states are the Left P. (left-libertarian) and the LKR (distinctly right-authoritarian; political distance PD > 1.5).

The latter is a small party collecting the original founder(s) of the AfD. The AfD is usually described as a (far-)right populist party, but started as a Euro-sceptic conservative and distinctly neo-liberal party. This is well captured in the splits graphs, with the LKR placed either as sister to the Bavarian (less neo-liberal) CSU or at a box connecting the (less authoritarian) CDU with the (more left) AfD. Other small parties (Humanist Party, the animal-rights party P!MUT, and the ÖDP, a conservative-green party) are equally stable.

The "right" is more tree-like in Bavaria than in Hesse because the so far all-ruling CSU tries (tried) to follow an old maxim of Franz-Josef Strauß, who said that there should never be a political party right (i.e. more conservative and nationalist) of the CSU in the Bavarian parliament — hence, it is much more similar to the right-wing populist AfD than the Hesse CDU.

In Hesse, the CDU ruled the state for the last four years with the Greens, which explains the position of the Green Party in both graphs. Being the opposition, and strongly opposing CSU policies (both economically and socially), they are much closer to the Left Party in Bavaria, while occupying a position between their coalition partner CDU and the "left" parties (Left P., SPD) in Hesse.

In Hesse, the Green Party takes effectively the position that in Bavaria is filled by the Pirate Party — the latter had a surge couple of years ago entering several state parliaments but now is back to 2% or less. With the Greens moving right, the Pirate Party Hesse remains more similar to the classical "left" of the political spectrum.

Another jumper is "Die PARTEI". This is hardly surprising, because they answer some questions in the Wahl-O-Mat by flipping a coin, or select the one allowing them to come up with most satiric arguments for their choice (sometimes not so different from those of certain party policies!).

Compared to the last federal election, the federal-state discrepancy in official party policies is striking, and this is well represented in their answers to the Wahl-O-Mat questionaires.

Same-scaled, taxon-pruned Neighbour-nets. The "Big-6" (7 in Bavaria), parties either already sitting in the parliaments or with chance to crack the 5%-hurdle in upcoming elections, in bold. Arrows indicate current ruling coalitions/government parties.

Being a frequent junior partner of the CDU/CSU, but the opposition in Bavaria (for decades) and Hesse (once the dominant party), the federal SPD is drawn much more to the "right" than its state counterparts. But this holds also for the federal CDU in the opposite way, and hence the FDP becomes the closest (still distant) "relative" of the AfD, which campaigned 2017 with a more neo-liberal program than it does now in Bavaria and Hesse (a necessity for populistic parties, as anyone likes free stuff).

The "blue-green" ÖDP comes closer to the Greens, because ecology-related bullet points took a more prominent place in the federal election Wahl-O-Mat. The "net-gap" in between them, and the edges shared by the ÖDP with the AfD or other parties of the "right" (FW, CDU/CSU, FDP), highlight their differences in social policies.

In Lower Saxony fewer parties competed, so let's prune the taxon set further. The Lower Saxony Neighbor-net has a different scale, because a more differentiated answer was possible. Usually, two parties oppose each other on all points, the maximum theoretically possible distance between two parties in the Lower Saxony matrix would be 4, i.e. they would strongly disagree on all bullet points that have no missing data for either one.

Again, parties in (last year's elections) or with chances to enter parliament (upcoming) in bold, and arrows indicating current or leaving government parties/coalitions.

Note how the Green Party and the SPD are placed with respect to the third main party from the traditional "left", the Left Party, and the FDP in comparison to CDU/CSU and AfD, forming the parliamentary "right". In Lower Saxony, the largest (SPD) and second-largeste (CDU) party followed the example of the Bund. The outgoing SPD-Greens coalition lost its tight majority; and although a CDU-FDP-AfD coalition would have had a majority and quite an overlap, involving the AfD in governments has been considered a no-go in Germany to this point (for all involved parties for different reasons).

Also in the Bundestag, the "right" would have a majority, but the SPD is close enough, and obviously Merkel's preferred partner. The polls for the Sunday elections (yesterday, when you read this) predict the CSU will lose its absolute majority. Also, here the natural partner (AfD) will be a no-go, so Bavaria will head towards interesting coalition talks with the Greens, being second in the polls. This would be the first time since 1958. The black-green Hesse government is also likely to lose its majority. However, adding the FDP (called "Jamaica coalition", because of the traditional colors of the three parties) should be no great deal, given its position between the current coalition partners.

Links

The post introducing Neighbor-nets to explore Wahl-O-Mat questionnaires can be found here.

More infographics (including plots of each bullet point on the splits graphs) revolving around political distances expressed in election questionnaires, or politics in general, can be found in my Res.I.P. posts — flagged as "Bundestagswahl" (federal elections, in German or English), "Landtagswahlen" (usually in German), "phylo-networks" (usually in English) and "politics" (again mixed).


Related data are included in a figshare fileset (open data; CC-BY licence), which may get updated when another election happens.