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Centrist Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer is pulling ahead in the CDU leadership contest. Here is why.

With one week to go until the CDU party convention in Hamburg, the German Christian Democrats are looking more energized than they did in a long time. As the party is gearing up to elect a new leader after Chancellor Merkel’s late-October announcement to step down as the CDU’s chairwoman, the three frontrunners in the contest to succeed her have been touring the country and presenting themselves to rank-and-file party members. The leadership contest has already reinvigorated the discourse in a political party that — historically — has seen little necessity for debate as long as the chancellory was reliably in Christian Democratic hands. (The CDU had to check their party by-laws to figure out how to handle a candidacy of more than two candidates — something that had never happened before in the party’s 73 year history).

New polling data released today show that the party’s newly-found enthusiasm translates into increased voter support — the CDU was polling 2 percent better than two weeks ago. The data also show that among CDU supporters, a plurality of 48 percent now favor centrist Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer as new party leader, up two percentage points from two weeks ago. Right-of-center Jens Spahn, the current minister of health, took a big hit, with only 2 percent of CDU supporters now preferring him as party chairman. Support for Friedrich Merz, who stands for more market-friendly economic policies but has also come under fire for his suggestion to abandon the individual right to asylum enshrined in the German constitution, has increased by 4 percent to 35 percent among CDU supporters.

The strong showing of Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer (or AKK as she is know in Germany) is in line with the centrist preferences of CDU supporters. The below figure shows the distribution of preferences of those respondents to a 2017 post-election survey who said that they feel a particular strong attachment to the CDU. In other words, these are CDU partisans. Note that this group is more narrowly defined than that of CDU voters and that not every CDU partisan is necessarily a CDU voter at every election. On the other hand, CDU partisans are not necessarily members of the party who will elect the new party chairperson next week in Hamburg. However, their opinions matter for the leadership contest since they are indicative of broader support for the CDU under alternative leaders. The data come from the German Longitudinal Election Study.

Preferences of CDU partisans (“I feel close to the CDU”) on two dimension

CDU partisans are about as centrist as can be, with an ever-so slight tendency to the center-right on both a state-market (economic) dimension and on an open-closed (societal) dimension. The party leader that is most in line with these preferences is Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer. And while it is alway possible that party members vote for a chairperson who will give them a new direction, the political reality of mass parties in modern democracies suggests that a successful leader is a moderator rather than an innovator. For the CDU, this is particularly true if AKK as a party leader could retain the chancellory for the party; a likely feat, given the thoroughly centrist preferences of the German electorate as a whole.

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German Parties’ Positions Mostly Match the Preferences of Their Voters. The Exception Is the SPD.

The GLES data are a gift that keeps on giving. Today, we are looking at preference profiles of voters of different parties. To recap, here is what the overall German electorate looks like:

Distribution of voters’ preferences with positions of political parties

Voters’ preferences are distributed on two dimensions, a left-right dimension that describes economic positions (from 0 = “left” = “more taxes, more social transfers” to 10 = “right” = “less taxes, less social transfers”), and a societal or “new politics” or “identity” dimension that stretches from 0 = “left” = “Green, Alternative, Libertarian” to 10 = “right” = “Traditional, Authoritarian, Nationalist”.

We can look at these preferences separately by parties. In the GLES survey, respondents were asked which party they voted for in the 2017 federal elections. We can use this information to distinguish between the preference profiles of voters of different parties. Note that the absolute numbers of self-proclaimed voters are different across parties. Warmer colors denote a higher density of voters in a location only relative to the numbers of voters of that party,  not relative to all voters.

Distribution of voters’ ideal points, by party

The figures reveal important differences between the ideal points of voters of different parties:

  • The AfD is the party with the most extreme distribution of voters, with voters concentrated mainly at the right-wing identity politics edge.
  • In contrast, voters of all three “old” parties, i.e. the established parties of old West Germany before ca. 1983 – CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP – are concentrated in the center of both distributions.
  • The Left party’s voters are the most dispersed, with preferences reaching into the right-wing extremes on the societal dimension.
  • The Green party’s self-proclaimed electorate is the most clearly concentrated “post-materialist”, even though it comprises a solidly center-left mass on both dimensions.

If we compare these distributions to the positions of parties, we find that the SPD is the party that is farthest away from the mass of the distribution of its voters. This is corroborated by statistical  analysis: The SPD is the only party for which the distance between a voter’s ideal point and the party’s position is not a significant predictor of vote choice. In other words: Those who voted for the SPD did not vote for the party because it was close to their preferred positions, but despite the fact that it was far away from their ideal points.

More specifically, the political positions of the SPD are too “left” on both dimension for the liking of their voters. Those voters who hold positions similar to those of the SPD vote for either the Greens or the Left party. Given the overall distribution of voters’ preferences, any further moves to the “left” are likely to result in a further decrease of  the SPD’s political support.

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Spatially speaking, the SPD performed better than expected in the 2017 German Federal Elections, while the CDU did worse. And the AfD is the least-liked party of them all

There is a long political science tradition of modeling voting decisions as based on which party a voter is “closest” to in a policy space. This space can, in principle, be of any dimensionality; for both theoretical and empirical work, the assumption of a two-dimensional policy space is frequently used.

Voting in such a framework is simple – voters calculate the distances between their own ideal point in the policy space and the positions of all parties competing for votes. They then vote for the party that is closest to their ideal point. There is no consideration of e.g. how likable a candidate is or whether a voter feels particularly attached to a specific party. All that matters is distance. In addition, voters’ preferences (their ideal points) are fixed and exogenously given and there is no abstention.

We can use this model to gauge which parties over- or underperformed in the 2017 German Federal elections, given their policy stances and given the stated preferences of voters. For voter’s ideal points, we turn to the GLES post election survey data and use the questions on  preferences over taxation and immigration to measure the ideal point of a voter on an economic and a societal dimension, respectively. For parties’ positions on the same two dimensions we use data from the Chapel Hill expert survey. Here is what this looks like:

Political parties are positioned around the center of the distributions on the two dimensions. Warmer colors denote that more voters with those preferences can be found in these regions of the policy space, while the dark blue color that can be found towards the extremes of the distributions indicate that there are few voters whose ideal points are located there.

Some parties, like the CDU/CSU and the SPD, are closer to where the bulk of voters are, while others like the FDP, the AfD, the Left party and the Greens, position themselves more to the edges. How should these positions translate into votes? If we assume voting based solely on minimum-distance considerations, the SPD should have gotten a mere 14.3 percent of the votes instead of the 20.5 percent it actually received. In contrast to this over-performance, the CDU/CSU should have received 39.1 percent of the votes instead of the 33 percent it ended up with. The table shows these numbers for all the parties currently in the German Bundestag

Party Expected Minimum Distance Vote Share Actual Vote Share Difference
CDU/CSU 39.5 33 -6.5
SPD 14.3 20.5 6.2
GREENS 9.8 8.9 -0.9
LEFT 7.9 9.2 1.3
FDP 9.9 10.7 0.8
AFD 18.5 12.6 -5.9

While the Greens, the Left party and the FDP performed about as predicted by a minimum-distance model, the AfD performed much worse than minimum-distance considerations would suggest.  One of the reasons for the discrepancy between predicted support and electoral performance might be the likability of parties. The GLES data contain information on how voters view parties. Respondents are asked to voice their opinion on parties by using an 11 point scale with a range from -5 to +5 where -5 stands for “I don’t think anything of this party at all” and +5 denotes “I think very highly of this party”. This question goes beyond mere distances in a policy space. It also covers emotional and longer-term attachment to political parties. 

Using this measure, we find that the AfD is the least liked party with an average value of 2.77 on the -5 to +5 scale. A full 60 percent of voters chose the worst possible judgment for the AfD. By comparison, the SPD has a mean favorability value of 7.4. However, we find an almost identical number for the CDU. Even considering the somewhat lower values for the CSU, the favorability rating cannot explain why the CDU/CSU underperformed their minimum-distance spatial expectations.

Maybe, then, it was all about the candidates? Comparing the favorability ratings of Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-candidate for the Chancellory Martin Schulz of the SPD, we find that the difference between Schulz and Merkel is about 1.25 in Merkel’s favor. In other words: If Merkel had been seen as unfavorably as Schulz, the CDU/CSU would have done even worse. On the other hand, a candidate Schulz with Merkel’s favorability rating would have outperformed the SPD’s spatial forecast by an even wider margin.

Looking ahead, these findings are good news for the CDU and not so good news for the SPD. With the SPD already outperforming their levels of support suggested by a spatial perspective, it is not clear how the party could increase their vote share, especially not if the SPD moved to a position further to the left. For the CDU, the party’s longtime strategy of steering a calm course could just be what is needed to bring voters back who should have voted for the party based on their preferences, but didn’t do so in the 2017 elections. In any event, neither party stands to gain from moving further to the extremes.