Abstract
In early 2017, after the nomination of Martin Schulz as candidate for chancellor, the SPD experienced a rapid surge in public support as measured in public opinion polls. Yet, the upward trend proved short-lived and the SPD ended up with the worst election result since 1949. Using data from a multi-wave panel survey, this analysis examines the voting trajectories of eight thousand German citizens over the course of one year in order to investigate the processes underlying the so called ‘Schulz effect’. The voter trajectories show that the surge and decline of public support for the SPD were accompanied by some reshuffling in the composition of its electorate. Moreover, different explanations of the party’s swaying in the polls are tested, showing that the SPD achieved the activation of dormant party identifiers but attracted and then lost other voters with diverse characteristics and policy preferences.
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Notes
- 1.
These explanations may interact as, e.g., some policy arguments may be of particular importance for highly involved voters or partisan independents.
- 2.
Supplementary Appendix 2 contains the full regression tables and shows the predicted probabilities of switching to the SPD for each category of the explanatory variables.
- 3.
The distributions of the responses on the original seven-point scale show that policy attitudes of vote switchers to the SPD were almost normally distributed (i.e., comprising supporters and opponents) and did not deviate substantially from other groups of voters (see Supplementary Appendix 3).
- 4.
Attitudes toward immigration have no effect on vote switching (not plotted, see Supplementary Appendix 2).
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Wuttke, A., Schoen, H. (2019). Who were the Voters behind the Schulz Effect? An Analysis of Voter Trajectories in the Run-up to the 2017 German Federal Election. In: Korte, KR., Schoofs, J. (eds) Die Bundestagswahl 2017. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-25050-8_3
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