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The “Cologne School” of Electoral Research

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2011

Richard L. Merritt
Richard L. Merritt
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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Abstract

The “Cologne School” of electoral research, which flourished during the 1960s and early 1970s, sprang from research conducted by Erwin K. Scheuch and Rudolf Wildenmann, and included studies carried on by their students. As exemplified by the ten studies reviewed here, it brought to West German political sociologists the theories and findings from American electoral research, tested some of its assumptions with West German data on voting behavior, and expanded and refined its basic notions in a comparative perspective. Especially significant were findings stressing social context as a factor influencing voting, more useful distinctions among kinds of “floating voters,” the lesser importance of party identification in the Federal Republic than in the United States, and the greater importance for West German voters of issues and ideology.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , July 1980 , pp. 599 - 622
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1980

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References

1 Erwin K. Scheuch and Rudolf Wildenmann, eds., Zur Soziologie der Wahl [On the Sociology of Elections], special issue (9/1965) of the Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1965)Google Scholar; see Merritt, review, in American Political Science Review, Vol. 60 (June 1966), 438-39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

Translations are by the author of this article.

2 The data are available at the Zentralarchiv für empirische Sozialforschung of the University of Cologne, the Inter-University Consortium for Political Research at the University of Michigan, and elsewhere.

3 See Werner Kaltefleiter, Zwischen Konsens und Krise: Eine Analyse der Bundestagswahl 1972 [Between Consensus and Crisis: An Analysis of the National Assembly Elections, 1972], Vol. 2 of Sozialwissenschaftliche Studien zur Politik, Publication of Sozialwissenschaftliches Forschungsinstitut der Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung (Bonn: Eichholz Verlag, 1973)Google Scholar.

4 See esp. Blankenburg, Erhard, Kirchliche Bindung und Wahlverhalten: Die sozialen Faktoren bei der Wahlentscheidung Nordrhein-Westfalen 1961 bis 1966 [Religious Ties and Electoral Behavior: Social Factors in the Outcome of Elections in North Rhine-Westphalia, 1961-1966] (Olten and Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag 1967)Google Scholar, and Blankenburg's important article, “Die politische Spaltung der westdeutschen Arbeiterschaft” [The Political Division of West German Labor], Archives européennes de sociologie, x (No. 1, 1969), 3–24Google Scholar.

5 The first four volumes of Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch jür Politik contain numerous significant articles, many of them in English; see also Comparative Politics, 11 (July 1970), special issue on the West German election of 1969, edited by John H. Herz.

6 See Storch de Gracia, Juan José Linz, “The Social Bases of West German Politics,” Ph.D. diss. (2 vols., Columbia University, 1960)Google Scholar, available from University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan; and Blankenburg (fn. 4, 1967).

7 Since 1953, the Federal Statistical Office has asked questions of a randomly selected sample of voters at the polls. The results are presented in various issues of the monthly, Wirtschaft und Statistik, and in Fachserie A, Reihe 8 of Statistik der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, both published by the Statistisches Bundesamt. Social background data (age, sex, size of community, religion, etc.) are correlated with the individual's actual vote as indicated on his or her ballot.

8 See , Kitzinger, German Electoral Politics: A Study of the 1957 Campaign (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960)Google Scholar.

9 , Heberle, From Democracy to Nazism: A Regional Case Study on Political Parties in Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1945)Google Scholar. The revised and expanded version used by Sahner for his analysis is Heberle's Landbevölkerung und Nationalsozialismus: Eine soziologische Untersuchung der politischen Willensbildung in Schleswig-Holstein 1918 bis 7932 [Rural Population and National Socialism: A Sociological Inquiry into the Growth of Political Consciousness in Schleswig-Holstein, 1918-1932], No. 6 of Schriftenreihe der Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1963)Google Scholar.

10 Rudolf Steiniger, Polarisierung und Integration: Eine vergleichende Untersuchung der strukturellen Versäulung der Gesellschaft in den Niederlanden und in Österreich [Polarization and Integration: A Comparative Inquiry into the Structural Compartmentalization of Society in the Netherlands and in Austria], Vol. 14 of Politik und Wähler (Meisenheim am Glan: Verlag Anton Hain, 1975)Google Scholar.

11 See also , Steiner, Gewaltlose Politik und Kulturelle Vielfalt: Hypothesen entwickelt am Beispiel der Schweiz [Nonforcible Politics and Cultural Diversity: Hypotheses Developed from the Example of Switzerland] (Bern and Stuttgart: Verlag Paul Haupt, 1970)Google Scholar; reviewed in Acta Sociologica, xv (No. 1, 1972), 96–97Google Scholar.

12 Steiner's indicator of social status combined occupation, father's occupation, education, standard of living, newspaper reading, and whether or not the respondent's political advice was sought by others.

13 For a critique of this method, see Klingemann, Hans D. and Pappi, Franz Urban, “Möglichkeiten und Probleme bei der Kumulation von Umfragen” [Possibilities and Problems in the Cumulation of Polls], in Wildenmann, Rudolf, ed., Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch für Politik, i (Munich and Vienna: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1969), 173-90Google Scholar. For their own procedures and findings, see Klingemann and Pappi's Politischer Radikalismus: Theoretische und methodische Probleme der Radikalismusforschung, dargestellt am Beispiel einer Studie anlässlich der Landtagswahl 1970 in Hessen [Political Radicalism: Problems of Theory and Method in Research on Radicalism, Illustrated by the Example of a Study of State Elections in Hesse, 1970] (Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1972)Google Scholar.

14 See, for example, , Kaase's“Determinanten des Wahlverhaltens bei der Bundestagswahl 1969,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, xi (March 1970), 46–110Google Scholar, and “Die Bundestagswahl 1972: Probleme und Analysen,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, xiv (May 1973), 145-90Google Scholar; Klingemann, “Issue-Kompetenz und Wahlentscheidung: Die Einstellung zu wertbezogenen politischen Problemen im Zeitvergleich,” Politische Vierteljahresschrift, xiv (May 1973), 227-56Google Scholar; Klingemann and Pappi (fn. 13); and Schleth, Uwe and Weede, Erich, “Causal Models on West German Voting Behavior,” in , Wildenmann, ed., Sozialwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch jür Politik, 11 (Munich and Vienna: Günter Olzog Verlag, 1971), 73–97Google Scholar. Wildenmann, Kaase, Klingemann, and others are now directing the Zentrum fur Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA), an academic institute for social sciences in Mannheim, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

15 Wildenmann, “Possibilities and Limitations of Surveys for Predictive Political Theory: A Position Paper,” presented at the X World Congress of the International Political Science Association, Edinburgh, August 1976. For a sharply focused critique of alternative prognostic “models” used by the Cologne school and the commercial firm INFAS, and the frequently acrimonious dispute between the two, see Naschold, Frieder, Wahlprognosen and Wählerverhalten in der BRD [Electoral Forecasting and Voting Behavior in the BRD], Urban Taschenbiicher, Series 80, No. 808 (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1971)Google Scholar.