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Electoral Politics and Voting Behavior in Western Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2011

Lewis J. Edinger
Lewis J. Edinger
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Extract

Voting has become truly an interdisciplinary object of investigation in recent years. Historians, statisticians, social psychologists, sociologists, and political scientists have focused their attention on electoral behavior, individually or in teams. Such studies have been principally the work of scholars in the traditional Western democracies—Britain, France, Norway, Sweden, the United States—and fall roughly into three patterns. One approach has been to analyze trends in group voting behavior on the basis of census and election statistics, and frequently poll data as well, in a search for meaningful correlations between voting trends and socio-economic factors. The work of Siegfried and, more recently, Goguel in France, of Heberle in Germany, Tingsten in Sweden, and Gosnell and Key in the United States belongs in this category. A second approach has been descriptive, identified in recent years particularly with Nuffield College at Oxford. The Nuffield studies of elections in Britain, France, Ireland, Poland, Italy, and Africa have focused on the efforts of candidates and parties to influence voters in a particular electoral campaign. They are intended primarily to be contributions to contemporary history and works of reference for future historians. Lastly, we have the investigations associated, in particular, with the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University and the Survey Research Center at the University of Michigan. These have focused on the political images and electoral behavior of individual voters and, particularly, on changes in their attitudes during a campaign and the reasons for such changes. They have relied, almost exclusively, on survey research methods which involve questioning a panel of representative voters at length before and after an election and, lately, even over a period of several years and elections.

Type
Review Articles
Information
World Politics , Volume 13 , Issue 3 , April 1961 , pp. 471 - 484
Copyright
Copyright © Trustees of Princeton University 1961

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References

1 German Democracy at Work: A Selective Study, Ann Arbor, Mich., 1955.

2 Münke, Stephanie, Wahlkampf und Machtverschiebung: Geschichte und Analyse der Berliner Wahlen vom 3. Dezember 1950, Berlin, 1952Google Scholar; Shell, Kurt and Diederich, Nils. “Die Berliner Wahl vom 7. Dezember 1958,” Zeitschrift für Politik VII (1960), pp. 252–81.Google Scholar

3 See, for example, Unkelbach, Helmut, Grundlagen der Wahlsystematik, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1956.Google Scholar

4 Wähler und Gewählte: Eine Untersuchung der Bundestagswahlen 1953, Berlin and Frankfurt am Main, Franz Vahlen, 1959.

5 The 1957 version provided that one-half of all deputies were to be elected by relative majorities in single-member constituencies, while the remaining seats were to be filled from party lists proportionate to the total vote that the parties polled in the country. No party was allowed such list seats unless it won either at least three constituency seats or 5 per cent of the valid votes cast in the election.

6 Statistisches Bundesamt, Die Wahl zum 3. Deutschen Bundestag am 15. September 1917, Heft 2, “Die Wahlbeteiligung und Stimmabgabe nach Geschlecht und Alter der Wähler: Ergebnisse einer Repräsentativstatistik,” Stuttgart, Kohlhammer, 1958.

7 The CDU, which received two-thirds of the mobilized votes, got 79 per cent of them in rural areas; the SPD, with a fourth of the mobilized votes, drew 89 per cent of them from these areas.

8 Wide discrepancies in the trend analysis of data of DIVO (using random-probability sampling methods) and EMNID (another major survey organization which relied on quota sampling) in Berlin prior to the election of 1958 further underscored the need for an analysis of the sampling methods and data interpretations of the different polling organizations. On the Berlin polls, see Shell, and Diederich, , op.cit., p. 271.Google Scholar

8 See Martin Lipset et al., “The Psychology of Voting,” in Lindzey, Gardner, ed., Handbook of Social Psychology, Cambridge, Mass., 1954, pp. 1163f.Google Scholar; and Lane, Robert E., Politicai Life, Glencoe, Ill., 1959, pp. 346, 349f.Google Scholar

10 Lane, , op.cit., p. 350.Google Scholar The data also conflict with certain of Duverger's hypotheses concerning the relationship between turnout and the voters' expectations regarding the closeness of the election. Turnout was apparently not significantly affected by the prevalent conviction among most voters that the CDU would win. See Duverger, Maurice, Political Parties, London, 1954, p. 386.Google Scholar

11 Some efforts in this direction were indicated by Peter Schmitt, one of the DIVO directors, in a fine paper on “The ‘Brand Image’ of the German Voter,” delivered at the ESOMAR/WAPOR Congress held in Brighton, England, in September 1958.

12 On this point, see Campbell, Anguset al., The American Voter, New York and London, 1960, particularly pp. 542f.Google Scholar; and Rokkan, Stein and Valen, Henry, “Parties, Elections and Political Behavior in the Northern Countries,” p. 75Google Scholar (hectographed manuscript of an article prepared for the 1960 Jubiläumschrift of the Institute of Political Science of the Free University of Berlin).

13 The form of electoral system—plurality in single-member districts in Britain, proportional representation in Scandinavia, and a “mixed” system in Germany—seems to me to be of relatively minor, if any, significance in maintaining governmental stability in these countries.

14 In this connection, see the observations of Campbell et al., op.cit., p. 550.

15 Lack of space prevents me from discussing the interesting DIVO data concerning the significance of informal primary contacts—with family members, associates at work, friends—in individual opinion formation during the campaign. Regrettably we lack data on the role of informal opinion leaders and reference groups in the formation of political opinions in the German political system, particularly over extended periods of time.

16 The plea for such studies has come from various “schools.” Thus David Butler of Nuffield College, who expressed doubts about the value of a comparative approach in his Study of Political Behavior (London, 1958), has written more recently in Elections Abroad (London, 1959) that “the whole field of elections is one where the difficulties inherent in all comparative political studies are at a minimum. By looking at the experience of successive countries it is possible to test the usefulness of certain universal questions … most of all, about the behaviour of the voter” (p. 9). Among the proponents of the survey research method, the argument that comparative studies are both feasible and necessary has most recendy and emphatically come from Stein Rokkan and Angus Campbell, both jointly (“Norway and the United States of America,” International Social Science Journal, XII, No. 1, 1960, pp. 36ff.), and separately (Campbell, , The American Voter, p. 7Google Scholar, and Rokkan, and Valen, , “Parties, Elections …,” pp. 17, 71–77).Google Scholar

17 For a recent critique of certain aspects of the survey research method, see Key, V. O. Jr, “The Politically Relevant in Surveys,” Public Opinion Quarterly, XXIV, No. 1 (Spring 1960), pp. 54–81.Google Scholar Morris Davis in “French Electoral Sociology” (ibid., XXII, No. 1, Spring 1958, pp. 35–56) questions the adequacy of the Goguel statistical studies and takes a slap at the Nuffield studies as well. See also Butler, , The Study of Political Behavior, pp. 56–75.Google Scholar