Superwahljahr by Roberts Geoffrey K.;

Author:Roberts, Geoffrey K.; [Roberts, Geoffrey K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

IdentifyingTrends

Four main trends are evident from Superwahljahr in the eastern Länder. Firstly, and most prominently, a process of electoral concentration can be observed, with an increasing share of the vote going to ‘core’ parties, and the marginalisation of smaller parties. So pronounced is this tendency that the FDP was driven out of all five state parliaments, and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen survived in only one state. Amongst the ‘core’ parties, CDU losses were relatively limited, given the scale of economic decline under its governments in four of the Länder and in Bonn. Over the five states as a whole the party's share of the vote fell by only 0.9 per cent from 42.0 per cent to 41.1 per cent. The SPD share of the vote across the five Landtag elections increased modestly by 4.2 per cent from 25.8 per cent to 30.0 per cent. The real winner, however, was the PDS, with an increase of 5.5 per cent from 12.7 per cent to 18.2 per cent. Collectively, the core parties thus increased their share of the vote from 80.5 per cent to 89.3 per cent. These trends were mirrored in slightly magnified form in the Bundestag election.

A second striking feature of the Landtag elections is polarisation, with very significant gains for the PDS. In none of the Länder was the main opposition party able to make an effective challenge to the government. In Brandenburg and Sachsen, where, as has already been observed, governments were emphatically confirmed in power, the main opposition parties lost ground and the PDS came within a hairsbreadth of forcing them into third place. Only in Thüringen did the gains of the main opposition party exceed those of the PDS. This syndrome is indicative of a polarised electorate, to which the concept of moderate opposition is alien, and which either endorses the government, or expresses fundamental opposition.

The third conclusion which can be drawn from Superwahljahr in the east, is that the electorate is more volatile than that in the west. The application of the Pedersen Index (the sum total of gains and losses in party share of the vote, divided by two) to Landtag elections in all parts of Germany between 1990 and 1994 shows an average index of electoral change of 14.8 in the east against 8.9 in the west.30 Volatility is unsurprising given the above-mentioned weakness of socially structured partisanship in a new party system.

There is, however, evidence that patterns of partisanship in the new Länder may be normalising. A fourth tendency observable in 1994 was for class voting to move a little closer to that in the old Federal Republic. In the 1994 Bundestag election, support for the parties of the centre-right amongst manual workers fell from 60.8 per cent to 43.9 per cent,31 only around five per cent higher than in the west, indicating that social groups may be gravitating to what would be regarded in the west as their natural political home (see Table 3). This development also provides an explanation for the catastrophic performance of the FDR and for the rise of the PDS vote.

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