Position and parties in ideological space and consequences for the vote in German federal elections since 1980

Research question/goal: 

Researchers apply various methods to identify policy or ideological spaces. In this project we tried to identify an ideological space for the German party system by relying on voters' evaluations of parties and leading politicians. The main result of the analysis was that the general left-right dimension could be identified with these data, but the second dimension which was necessary to describe differences in the evaluations was not necessarily linked to ideological or policy differences between parties or politicians.

Fact sheet

Duration: 
1997 to 1998
Status: 
completed

Publications