Policy Representation Across the Political Spectrum

To trace policy representation across the German political spectrum, we order the 31 German parties that took part in the 2017 federal election so that they are arranged in a ‘spectrum’ according to their policy profiles. The policy profiles are 38-dimensional vectors of the parties’ Yes/No answers to 38 policy questions from the 2017Wahl-O-Mat, the German voting advice application (VAA), and the proximity between the party profiles is described by the matrix of their correlations. Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to this matrix, we construct a contiguous party ordering, where the neighboring parties have close policy profiles. The ordering constructed this way fits nicely to the left–right ideological axis, which is currently considered obsolete by many political scientists. However, this axis is not rectilinear but rolled into a circumference. Now, the far-left and far-right ends of such a political spectrum approach each other, although they remain somewhat distant, resulting in the spectrum’s horseshoe-like (Ω-like) shape. For comparisons, contiguous party orderings are constructed using four other models, and the results are discussed. One takeaway: a serious warning that the electoral success of a party depends neither on its policy representation capability nor on its left–right orientation. This means that the principles of representative democracy are under stress and the current electoral system is failing to meet its objectives.