Analysis of the 2013 German Bundestag Election

Abstract

The 2013 German Bundestag election is analyzed in the same way as the 2017 Bundestag election is analyzed in Chapter 8. The positions of 28 German parties on 38 topical policy issues are compared with the statistics of relevant public opinion polls. The results are summarized in the indices of popularity (the average percentage of the population represented) and universality (frequency of representing a majority) at both the party and the coalition levels. We show that the election winners are not the best representatives of public opinion, whereas the best representatives receive too few votes to be allocated Bundestag seats. Since the same problem is inherent in the 2009, 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections, we conclude that such an election failure is not occasional but appears to have a systemic character. To overcome it, the Third Vote method introduced in Chapter 10 is applied to hypothetically reallocate the Bundestag seats, resulting, as previously, in a significant gain in the Bundestag’s representativeness.