Abstract
The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party “Alternative for Germany” (AfD). The idea of a political space is closely connected to the ubiquitous use of spatial metaphors in political talk. In particular the idea of a “distance” between “political positions” would suggest that political actors are situated in a metric space. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database we investigate to which extent the spatial metaphors so common in political talk can be brought to mathematical rigor. Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the United States with respect to a new political cleavage related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration of the political space in the sense that 1) the main cleavage within the political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the cultural axis, but 2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is changing towards globalization related topics. In this paper, we empirically address this reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new “cultural right” issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.
Highlights
We considered to weight the manifestos with the vote share at the corresponding elections to avoid that the spaces are dominated by small parties, but decided against it, because first, we want to consider political spaces as semantic spaces and, second, for the cases that we study in this paper, some of the political proposals of smaller parties, such as the AfD (Alternative for Germany) or the Pirates appeared to be much more salient in the public discussion than it was reflected in there final vote share (4.7 and 2.2%, respectively)
A robust finding for using PCA to construct political spaces - be it for a single election or for a series of elections - is that very often the first principal component, i.e., the direction with the largest variance in the issue space, shows high correlations with the traditional left - right axis as it is represented by the RILE index
The correlations between the RILE scores of the political parties and the scores of one of the principal components is always high, often larger than 0.9 for both the inductive political spaces constructed from the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR) categories and for the spaces estimated from the topic models
Summary
The most widely used one-dimensional political space that is used with MARPOR data is the RILE index, a left-right scale that is estimated by calculating the difference between the sum of the normalized counts (in percent) of a set of 13 left and right issues, respectively. English label freedom social market economy public investment jobs small government rural areas sports working hours local affairs disability and inclusion science developmental policy tourism anti-capitalism basic income east Germany refugees and EU care pirates AfD army — NATO and Russia culture schools finance and banking regulation work and wages digitalisation immigration and religion universities security and civil rights drugs pensions family and children taxes climate protection women health care — arms export and foreign missions energy and mobility housing food safety and animal protection — economic and a socio-cultural dimension They called the poles of the socio-cultural axis “Libertarian” and “Authoriarian.” See Table 5 for the corresponding MARPOR categories.
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