Posted in 2015
The long-term relation between turnout and electoral support for social democracts in Germany
- 27 June 2015
- research

At the 5th Annual General Conference of the European Political Science Association I had the opportunity to present a paper entitled “The Crisis of Social Democracy and the Political Demobilisation of the Working Class in Germany”. In this paper I analyse the dual decline of turnout in Germany and of the support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). I show that both changes are linked and concentrated in a core group of SPD supporters, the manual working class.
AK Wahlen paper on ticket-splitting in Germany
- 12 June 2015
- research

At the Session of the AK “Wahlen und politische Einstellungen (the German specialist group on election, electoral behaviour and political attitudes) I had the opportunity to present a paper on split-ticket voting in Germany. In this paper I find that there is more strategic voting in the direct candidate votes than in the list votes, but that most split-ticket voting appears to be non-strategic.
Tracking parties’ positions using a dynamic idealpoint model
- 05 June 2015
- research

In Berlin, at the Manifesto Project User Conference I presented a paper entitled “Challenges in Tracking Parties’ Positions in Multi-dimensional Policy Spaces by Manifesto Project data: A Dynamic Idealpoint Model and its Extensions”. In this paper I discuss way of reconstructing political positions from coded political texts based on an idealpoint model (introduced in a publication of mine in Political Analysis) as well as some extension of this model that address some challenges, such as different acuity of political aims.