IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/zbw/espost/253436.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

A New Era of Electoral Instability

Author

Listed:
  • Schmitt-Beck, Rüdiger
  • Roßteutscher, Sigrid
  • Schoen, Harald
  • Weßels, Bernhard
  • Wolf, Christof

Abstract

Over the past half century, the behavior of German voters has changed profoundly. After a long period of stability, elections have dramatically altered their character—at first rather gradually, but during the past decade at an accelerated speed. Voters' decision-making has become much more volatile, rendering election outcomes less predictable. The long-term process of party system fragmentation that had already been going on for a while intensified sharply. A particularly conspicuous outcome of this period of turbulent electoral politics was the termination of Germany's exceptionality as one of the few European countries without a strong right-wing populist party. The chapter traces this development in detail. It identifies three distinctive phases of party system development: 1949 to 1976, 1980 to 2005, and 2009 to 2017. The topoi of realignment and dealignment are evoked as key concepts for interpreting the trends that have become increasingly visible since the second phase.

Suggested Citation

  • Schmitt-Beck, Rüdiger & Roßteutscher, Sigrid & Schoen, Harald & Weßels, Bernhard & Wolf, Christof, 2022. "A New Era of Electoral Instability," EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics, pages 3-24.
    • Handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:253436
    DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198847519.003.0001
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/253436/1/Full-text-chapter-Schmitt-Beck-et-al-A-new-era.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1093/oso/9780198847519.003.0001?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. von der Heyde, Leah & Haensch, Anna-Carolina & Wenz, Alexander, 2023. "Assessing Bias in LLM-Generated Synthetic Datasets: The Case of German Voter Behavior," SocArXiv 97r8s, Center for Open Science.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:zbw:espost:253436. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/zbwkide.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.