Geschwister-Scholl-Institut für Politikwissenschaft (GSI)
print

Sprachumschaltung

Navigationspfad


Inhaltsbereich

Fundamental Measurement of Party Preference Orders in the German Multiparty System 2021

In accordance with Coombs (1950) we extract preference orders of the German electorate based on pairwise comparisons. Application background is the 2021 German federal election with the six parties entering the Bundestag: AfD, CDU/CSU, FDP, Greens, Linke, SPD. Accounting for indifferences we characterize the complex preference orders as in Brady/Ansolabehere (1989) given a complex multiparty system. Of major interest will be whether the left-right dimension can be identified as an underlying joint scale, or whether there are several dimensions or subpopulations (see Norpoth 1979, van Schuur 1989, Borg et al. 2018). This is of fundamental interest for parties’ positioning strategies – which continue to be highly centered on a left-right discourse, despite completely new issues like Covid, climate change or immigration etc..

Additionally, the project intends to compare congruences and incongruences between preference orders based on fundamental measurement and scalometers in order to identify the latters pitfalls. Finally, we will statistically explain the preference orders with prominent electoral research variables (candidate evaluations, party evaluations, issue positions) based on rank ordered logit models (Allison / Christaki 1984, Herrmann et al. 2006).


PI: Paul W. Thurner
Research Assistant: Fabian Haggerty
Funded by: Laufer Stiftung
Polling Agency: YouGov

References

  • Allison, P. D., and N. Christakis. 1994. Logit models for sets of ranked items. In Vol. 24 of Sociological Methodology,ed. P. V. Marsden, 123–126. Oxford: Blackwell.
  • Coombs, C. H. 1964. A Theory of Data. New York: Wiley.
  • Borg, Ingwer, Patrick J.F. Groenen, and Patrick Mair. 2018. Applied multidimensional scaling and unfolding. New York: Springer.
  • Herrmann, Michael, Susumu Shikano, Paul W. Thurner, and Axel Becker, 2006: Die Analyse von Wählerpräferenzen mit Rank Ordered Logit. In: Bräuninger, Thomas and Joachim Behnke (eds.): Jahrbuch Handlungs- und Entscheidungstheorie, Band 4, 113–134.
  • Norpoth, Helmut, 1979: Dimensionen des Parteienkonflikts und Präferenzordnungen der deutschen Wählerschaft: Eine Unfolding-Analyse. Zeitschrift für Sozialpsychologie 10: 350-362.
  • Van Schuur, W. H. 1989. Unfolding the German Political Parties. In Advances in Psychology, vol. 60, New Developments in Psychological Choice Modeling, ed. De Soete, G., Feger, H., and Klauer, K. C., 259–90. Amsterdam: North-Holland.

Servicebereich