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Cleavage Structures and Voter Alignments within Nations

Explaining Electoral Outcome in Germany’s Counties, 1998 to 2005

Gesellschaftliche Konfliktlinien und Wählerbindungen innerhalb von Nationalstaaten

Zur Erklärung von Wahlergebnissen in den deutschen Stadt- und Landkreisen, 1998 bis 2005

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Abstract

Despite its general popularity the cleavage theory has only rarely been used to explain regional electoral outcome. In this paper we examine whether a region's social structure and its electoral results are systematically linked. To analyse the political preferences of an entire regional electorate in a single step, electoral results are translated into a left-right position for each region using Gross and Sigelmann's concept of the ideological centre of gravity. We then analyse whether the left-right differences between the regions can be traced back to the socio-structural composition of regional populations. We apply this approach to the results of the 1998, 2002, and 2005 German federal elections in all of the 439 counties. Our results suggest that the church-state cleavage and the postmaterialism cleavage shape electoral outcomes in western regions considerably, but that the impact of the capital-labour divide has mostly vanished. Contrarily, eastern electorates seem largely guided by a centre-periphery cleavage that is rooted in a leftist mentality, but not much else.

Zusammenfassung

Trotz ihrer Popularität wurde die Cleavagetheorie bisher nur sehr selten zur Erklärung regionaler Wahlergebnisse herangezogen. In dieser Studie wird untersucht, inwiefern die sozio-strukturellen Merkmale und die Wahlergebnisse in einer Region miteinander in Beziehung stehen. Um die politischen Präferenzen gesamter regionaler Wählerschaften in einem einzigen analytischen Schritt erfassen zu können, werden die Wahlergebnisse in eine rechts-links-Position im Sinne von Gross und Sigelmanns Konzept des ideologischen Gravitätszentrums übersetzt. In der Folge wird überprüft, ob die beobachteten rechts-links-Unterschiede auf die sozio-strukturelle Zusammensetzung einer Region zurückgeführt werden können. Dieser Ansatz wird auf die Ergebnisse der Bundestagswahlen der Jahre 1998, 2002 und 2005 in allen 439 Landkreisen und kreisfreien Städten angewendet. Die Resultate unserer Untersuchung zeigen, dass der Staat-Kirche-Cleavage und der Postmaterialismus-Cleavage regionale Wahlergebnisse in Westdeutschland maßgeblich beeinflussen, wohingegen der Arbeit-Kapital-Gegensatz an Bindungswirkung eingebüßt hat. In den ostdeutschen Regionen scheinen die Wählerschaften hauptsächlich durch einen Zentrums-Peripherie-Konflikt geprägt, der sich aus einer linksorientierten Mentalität speist, während die übrigen westdeutschen Erklärungsmuster hier versagen.

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Notes

  1. The literature offers an abundance of reasons for diverging voting behaviour. A main contender of the cleavage theory is the rational or political choice theory, supported by scholars such as Downs (1957), with his idea of position issues, and by Stokes (1963), with his notion of valence issues. Succeeding refinements include, for example, the works of Hinich and Munger (1994) or Rabinowitz and Macdonald (1989). There is furthermore the Columbia School (Berelson et al. 1954; Lazarsfeld et al. 1944) that focuses on the social background of individual voters. Scholars belonging to the Michigan School (Campbell et al. 1960; Campbell et al. 1954) adopt a behavioural perspective and concentrate on voters’ party identification, candidate preferences, and campaign issues. Another strand of research sees individuals’ evaluations of economic conditions as the main determinants of voting behaviour (Fiorina 1978; Key 1966; Kiewiet 1983; Lewis-Beck 1988). In recent years, attempts have been made to integrate the propositions of the various schools (Adams et al. 2005; Miller and Shanks 1996).

  2. The importance of regional socio-structural factors in national elections in Great Britain is studied by Ron Johnston and Pattie (2006); in Canada by Bélanger and Eagles (2006), Blake (1978) and Richard Johnston (1991); in the United States by Darmofal (2008) and Jenkins et al. (2004). Other authors examine the effect of regional cleavages on sub-national or local party systems: For the Swiss cantons see Ladner (2004) and Vatter (2002, 2003); for municipal elections in Belgium see Geys (2006); and for the autonomous communities in Spain see Lago Penas (2004). Flick and Vatter (2007) see regional societal cleavages as one explanation for varying party fragmentation across the 16 German Länder parliaments. Hearl et al. (1996) study regional voting patterns in European Union member states. For an example of nation-state aggregate-level electoral research, see Mair (2002).

  3. Restricting ourselves to macro-level analysis, our goal is the detection of patterns on an aggregate level and to find causes for these patterns on the aggregate ecological level (Thomsen 1987, p. 12). We do not seek to account for individual behaviour, even though we draw on individual level research for the generation of our hypotheses.

  4. This use of left-right values as an operationalisation of electoral outcomes is, in our view, a feasible strategy, as the left-right values are a function of party vote shares, as will be shown.

  5. As an example one might think of the classical left claim of social justice. Green parties have added to this claim by calling for environmental protection, and refer to it with the concept of inter-generational justice. Rather unsurprisingly, green parties throughout Europe are characterised as leftist parties.

  6. When referring to the Christian Democrats as a party of the right, we do not intend to negate the Catholic welfarist tradition (katholische Soziallehre), which, among other factors, contributed to the formation of the continental conservative welfare state regime (Esping-Andersen 1990; Manow 2002). However, applying the term ‘right’ to Christian Democrats and Catholicism seems justified: While both may be committed to a functioning social security system, they also emphasise the subsidiary nature of social security and stand for (at least traditionally) a system that upholds social “status differences” (Esping-Andersen 1990, p. 27). The label ‘right’ is in this respect to be understood in a German context and in relation to the German party system.

  7. To substantiate this choice of indicators we estimated bivariate correlation coefficients between all parties’ vote shares in the counties and an urbanisation and an education indicator (see Tables 3 and 7 for operationalisations). We found that both of these indicators correlated positively, significantly and most strongly with the share of Green votes.

  8. This conflict line does not correspond to the centre-periphery cleavage of Lipset and Rokkan (1967, p. 14). Whereas the latter authors see the origin of this conflict in the national revolution of the 19th century, we refer to a division resulting from the German reunification process in 1989/90.

  9. The PDS changed its name to Linkspartei.PDS in 2005. For reasons of clarity we use the abbreviation PDS throughout the whole article.

  10. At least this was the case until the (eastern) PDS and the (western) WASG united in 2007 to form die Linke as an all-German socialist party (see Neu 2007).

  11. One might argue that electoral outcomes and ideological positions of electorates are two distinct concepts. In the context of this analysis, however, it seems justifiable to operationalise electoral outcomes as electorates’ ideological positions, because the latter are a function of the former, as will be demonstrated.

  12. Germany’s political and administrative system is structured vertically into three layers and thus offers various types of territorial units. Below the federal level (Bund), there is the subnational level, constituted by the Länder, the local level, including Kreise or counties, and Gemeinden or municipalities. According to the EU-Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS), the counties are classified as NUTS-3 level units (http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/nuts/codelist_en.cfm?list=nuts, 15.05.2009).

  13. The city-states Hamburg and Berlin are counted as one urban county each, whereas the city-state Bremen consists of two urban counties, Bremen and Bremerhaven. Today’s county Hannover was formed in 2001 by merging the former rural county of Hannover with the urban county of the same name. For our analysis we treat Hannover as one county throughout all the period from 1998 to 2005.

  14. The actual data used in the present study is not displayed in Bräuninger and Debus’ (2008) paper but was obtained from Marc Debus directly.

  15. This strategy was chosen in order to account for these two important characteristics of Green milieus in a single variable. The results of the final regression analyses change only to a negligible extent if the two indicators are included separately.

  16. When it comes to the interpretation of the regression results, we also refer to the significance levels of the coefficients. Significance test were originally designed to analyse population samples, and not entire populations, as it is presently the case. We follow Broscheid and Gschwend’s (2003, p. 3) assumption that “population data, even though they do not exhibit sampling error, are subject to a variety of stochastic processes […] that have to be part of the analysis, for example through the investigation of […] significance tests”. See also Broscheid and Gschwend (2005) and Diekmann (2002, p. 600).

  17. It should be noted that the differences in significance levels between the east and the west may, to a certain extent, result from the smaller number of units in comparison to the west and to Germany in total. However, the number of units in the east is still rather large, particularly in comparison to other international and subnational comparative research studies. We thus assume that our interpretation of the statistical results constitutes an adequate picture of the situation in eastern Germany.

  18. Including Germany in this list is obviously a contradiction in itself, as Germany clearly does have a communist legacy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Konstanz, PO Box 84, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Raphael Magin M.A. &  Markus Freitag

  2. University of Bern, Lerchenweg 36, 3000, Bern 9, Switzerland

    Adrian Vatter

Authors
  1. Raphael Magin M.A.
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  2. Markus Freitag
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  3. Adrian Vatter
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Correspondence to Raphael Magin M.A..

Additional information

We would like to thank Marc Debus for his valuable comments and the provision of data. We also owe thanks to Susumu Shikano, two anonymous reviewers, the editor of this journal, as well as to the participants of the 3-Nations-Conference of the German, the Austrian, and the Swiss Political Science Associations 2008 in Osnabrück, Germany, Workshop 7, and of the Annual Conference of the Swiss Political Science Association 2009 in St. Gallen, Switzerland, Workshop “Political Behaviour” for commenting on earlier versions of this paper.

Appendix

Appendix

Table 7 Operationalisation of independent variables
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Table 8 Cleavage structures and left-right orientation in Germany (total)
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Table 9 Cleavage structures and left-right orientation in west Germany
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Table 10 Cleavage structures and left-right orientation in east Germany
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Magin, R., Freitag, M. & Vatter, A. Cleavage Structures and Voter Alignments within Nations. Z Vgl Polit Wiss 3, 231–256 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12286-009-0062-1

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