The 2013 election in Germany (Special Issue)

With just six months to go until the 2017 Bundestag election, this is perhaps the ideal time to reflect on the rather remarkable 2013 election. Perhaps there is also a very fine line between Political Science and Contemporary History, and the German electoral studies community has a particular gift to step exactly on that line without ever quite crossing over? Either way, German Politics (the journal) published a fine Special Issue on the 2013 election in Germany. The articles focus on a number of highly specific research questions: Ben Christian employs the Rolling Cross Section-component of the GLES to study how voters learn to identify what would be the “correct” electoral choice for them over the course of the campaign. Martin Elff and Sigrid Roßteutscher show that the link between dealignment and party decline (of the SPD in particular) is more nuanced than previously thought. Marc Debus demonstrates that – female Chancellor or not – gender had little effect on voting for the Christian Democrats in recent Bundestag elections.

germany 2013 election photo
Photo by Glyn Lowe Photoworks. The 2013 election in Germany (Special Issue) 1

Katsunori Seki and Guy D. Whitten pit various economic voting models against each other. Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield show that as far as mainstream parties are concernend, “Europe” is still largely a non-issue in German Politics, even in these troubled times. Sascha Huber looks at motivations for coalition voting to explain the decline of the FDP in the last weeks preceding the 2013 election. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck dissects the AfD’s 2013/2014 electorate into two groups: euro-sceptics and xenophobes. Heiko Giebler and Bernhard Weßels demonstrate that good campaigns made voters remember local candidates. Finally, yours truly casts another long and dirty look at partisan dealignment, which has almost come to a halt in Germany. And since German Politics is a somewhat arcane journal, you may want to have a look at the nearly identical author’s (pre-publication) version.

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