Abstract
This article explores the changing politics of economic inequality in Germany in a time of economic austerity and high unemployment and how these changes have affected the electoral fortunes of parties on the German Left. While the SPD experienced a precipitous drop in its electoral support in the most recent federal elections, Die Linke (or the ‘Left’ Party) has emerged as a viable electoral force on the far Left. Though support for the PDS, Die Linke's predecessor, was almost exclusively confined to the Länder of the former DDR, Die Linke has seen its vote share increase in parts of Germany that were traditionally strongholds of the SPD. We analyze constituency-level election results from the 2005 and 2009 federal elections, examining the factors associated with the increase in support for Die Linke. We find that the party's vote share increased the most in constituencies suffering from economic decline, as well as in areas that were previously strongly supportive of the SPD. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of these findings for the future of the German Left and for parties of the far Left in other advanced industrial countries.
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Notes
For a detailed discussion, see Vail (2009).
Data from Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Key Figures, accessed at http://www.lisproject.org/keyfigures.htm on 17 January 2008.
For a more detailed discussion of the post-war German Social Market Economy and its relationship to income distribution, see Bowyer and Vail (2011).
In 1963, total expenditures were a mere DM 1.86 billion. By 1973, this figure had more than quintupled to DM 5.66 billion, and, by 1983, total outlays had risen to DM 17.6 billion. By 1998, total Sozialhilfe expenditures, including those in the new Eastern Länder, were DM 45 billion (DM 39.4 billion in former West Germany) (Breuer and Engels, 1999, p. 18).
In 1999, the basic standard rate ranged from a low of DM 522 (€266.89) per month in Thüringen and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to a high of DM 548 (€280.19) per month in Hessen and Baden-Württemberg. If we define 1995 price levels as 100, the index of the real value of the standard rate shrank from 102.9 in 1992 to 102.7 in 1997 (Breuer and Engels, 1999, pp. 4, 22).
This independent commission was created in 2002 and led by Peter Hartz, an influential German business leader and Schröder's former colleague at Volkswagen.
For a discussion of the fiscal drivers and implications of the Hartz IV reform, see Hassel and Schiller (2010).
Between 2002 and 2005, the SPD's share among working-class voters in western Germany shrank from 43 to 41 per cent and, in eastern Germany, declined sharply from 41 to 26 per cent. At the same time, the Linkspartei's share of the working-class vote in 2005 was 8 per cent in the west (compared to 2 per cent for the PDS in 2002), and 28 per cent in the east (compared to 12 per cent for the PDS in 2002). Defections from the SPD to the Linkspartei were even more dramatic among the unemployed (Nachtwey and Spier, 2007, pp. 22, 30).
The electoral data were downloaded on 12 February 2010 from the Federal Returning Officer's website: http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/de/bundestagswahlen/BTW_BUND_09/veroeffentlichungen/index.html.
The structural data were downloaded on 12 February 2010 from the Federal Returning Officer's website: http://www.bundeswahlleiter.de/de/bundestagswahlen/BTW_BUND_09/strukturdaten/StruktBtwkr2009.csv.
All constituencies in Berlin are coded as being located in the Old Federal States.
Three Länder (Saarland, Sachsen and Thüringen) held elections in August 2009, 4 weeks before the federal elections. These states were coded according to their government composition before the August elections. At that time, the SPD took part in the governing coalitions in eight Länder: Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Rheinland-Pfalz, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt and Schleswig-Holstein.
We are indebted to an anonymous reviewer for Comparative European Politics, for this insight.
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Vail, M., Bowyer, B. Poverty and partisanship: Social and economic sources of support for the far Left in contemporary Germany. Comp Eur Polit 10, 505–524 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cep.2011.22