The Self-Proclaimed Defender of Freedom: The AfD and the Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has challenged nearly every aspect of life and superseded issues at the core of populist radical right (PRR) parties' ideology, dispossessing them of one of their main narratives. This also challenged the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a relatively young but strong PRR party in opposition. We explore how the party has adjusted its policy supply to this unprecedented situation and how this has affected its popularity among German voters, building our analysis on press releases issued by the AfD between January 2020 and March 2021, vote intention data and recent election results. Initially, the party's reaction was inconsistent, but from autumn 2020 the AfD focused on fuelling discontent with the government's lockdown measures, acting as a supporter of the anti-coronavirus demonstrations. It framed its response as elite critique. So far, its siding with the lockdown protesters, however, has not had any positive effect on support for the party

A Repository of Political Party and Interest Group Texts

Work Package 4 of OPTED has created a repository of links to data collections of political text produced by political parties and interest groups (IG), using the definitions and criteria outlined in the first deliverable (D4.1). The repository can be accessed here: https://perma.wzb.eu/opted_wp4_inventory. The inventory consists of two spreadsheets (datasets). One spreadsheet each for political parties and IGs. It contains information about the corpora we identified including temporal, country, and party coverage, accessibility, and usability. The variable text.category informs the user about the text type that can be accessed via the specific corpus, e.g. press releases, manifestos, websites. We regard the repository as a living document that will continue to grow and be updated over the full course of the design phase. The codebook to this repository can be found here: https://perma.wzb.eu/opted_wp4_codebook_inventory. In this report, we provide an overview of our approach to identifying data repositories and the available data we have identified in key areas to date. In the process of creating this repository, we have also identified areas where data has yet to be compiled or is not readily available from online sources

Die Ampelkoalition

Nach der Bundestagswahl 2021 kam es in Deutschland zum ersten Mal seit den 1950er-Jahren zu einer Drei-Parteien-Koalition. Was bedeutet das für die politische Repräsentation der Wähler*innen? Und wie wurden die Wahlversprechen in das Regierungsprogramm übersetzt? Die Autor*innen gehen diesen Fragen sowohl allgemein als auch für vier zentrale Politikfelder (Verkehrswende, Bildungsgerechtigkeit, Familie und Beruf, Digitalisierung in der Gesundheitspolitik) nach. Sie untersuchen, was vor den Wahlen versprochen wurde, wie dies Eingang in die Sondierungsgespräche fand und unter welchen Reibungsverlusten es schließlich im Koalitionsvertrag steht

Positions and saliency of immigration in party manifestos: A novel dataset using crowd coding

Immigration is one of the most widely debated issues today. It has, therefore, also become an important issue in party competition, and radical right parties are trying to exploit the issue. This opens up many pressing questions for researchers. To answer these questions, data on the self-ascribed and unified party positions on immigration and immigrant integration issues is needed. So far, researchers have relied on expert survey data, media analysis data and ‘proxy’ categories from the Manifesto Project Dataset. However, the former two only give the mediated party position, and the latter relies on proxies that do not specifically measure immigration. The new dataset presented in this article provides researchers with party positions and saliency estimates on two issue dimensions – immigration and immigrant integration – in 14 countries and 43 elections. Deriving the data from manifestos enables the provision of parties’ unified and unfiltered immigration positions for countries and time points not covered in expert surveys and media studies, making it possible to link immigration and immigrant integration positions and saliency scores to other issue areas covered in the Manifesto Project Dataset. Well-established criteria are used to distinguish between statements on (1) immigration control and (2) immigrant integration. This allows for a more fine-grained analysis along these two dimensions. Furthermore, the dataset has been generated using the new method of crowd coding, which allows a relatively fast manual coding of political texts. Some of the advantages of crowd coding are that it is easily replicated and expanded, and, as such, presents the research community with the opportunity to amend and expand upon this coding scheme

Räumliche Modelle des Repräsentationsgefühls. Vergleichende Analysen mit Fokus auf die Bundestagswahl 2009

Die Repräsentationsbeziehung zwischen Wählern und Parteien ist entscheidend für das Funktionieren repräsentativer Demokratien. Der Grad der gefühlten Repräsentation hat Einfluss auf den Delegationsmechanismus und die Demokratiezufriedenheit. Daher untersucht dieser Artikel das Repräsentationsgefühl. Mithilfe räumlicher Modelle wird für 25 Wahlen in 23 Demokratien gezeigt, dass die von Wählern wahrgenommene Distanz zu Parteien das Repräsentationsgefühl besser erklärt als die Wahlentscheidung. Dies gilt nicht nur hinsichtlich ideologischer Links-Rechts-Unterschiede im internationalen Vergleich, sondern bestätigt sich für die Bundestagswahl 2009 ebenfalls für Sachfragendistanzen. Räumliche Modelle, die üblicher Weise zur Erforschung des Wahlverhaltens genutzt werden, eignen sich demnach noch besser dazu, Repräsentationsgefühle zu erklären.Akzeptierte Manuskriptfassung (postprint) / Accepted version (postprint)The representational relationship between voters and parties is crucial in order for modern democracies to function. The degree to which voters feel represented has an impact on their satisfaction with democracy and the mechanism of delegation. Accordingly, this article examines voters’ perceived sense of representation. Spatial models show that in 25 elections in 23 democracies voters’ perceived proximity to different parties better explains the feeling of being represented than their voting decision. Not only does this finding apply to ideological left-right differences in comparative perspective, it also holds with regard to issue proximity in an analysis of the German federal elections in 2009. Hence, spatial models that are commonly used for explaining voting behaviour are even better suitable to explain perceived representation

Die Ampelkoalition

Nach der Bundestagswahl 2021 kam es in Deutschland zum ersten Mal seit den 1950er-Jahren zu einer Drei-Parteien-Koalition. Was bedeutet das für die politische Repräsentation der Wähler*innen? Und wie wurden die Wahlversprechen in das Regierungsprogramm übersetzt? Die Autor*innen gehen diesen Fragen sowohl allgemein als auch für vier zentrale Politikfelder (Verkehrswende, Bildungsgerechtigkeit, Familie und Beruf, Digitalisierung in der Gesundheitspolitik) nach. Sie untersuchen, was vor den Wahlen versprochen wurde, wie dies Eingang in die Sondierungsgespräche fand und unter welchen Reibungsverlusten es schließlich im Koalitionsvertrag steht