[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/stcchp/978-3-030-39691-6_9.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Policy Representation Across the Political Spectrum

In: Analytical Theory of Democracy

Author

Listed:
  • Andranik Tangian

    (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology)

Abstract
To trace policy representation across the German political spectrum, we order the 31 German parties that took part in the 2017 federal election so that they are arranged in a ‘spectrum’ according to their policy profiles. The policy profiles are 38-dimensional vectors of the parties’ Yes/No answers to 38 policy questions from the 2017Wahl-O-Mat, the German voting advice application (VAA), and the proximity between the party profiles is described by the matrix of their correlations. Applying principal component analysis (PCA) to this matrix, we construct a contiguous party ordering, where the neighboring parties have close policy profiles. The ordering constructed this way fits nicely to the left–right ideological axis, which is currently considered obsolete by many political scientists. However, this axis is not rectilinear but rolled into a circumference. Now, the far-left and far-right ends of such a political spectrum approach each other, although they remain somewhat distant, resulting in the spectrum’s horseshoe-like (Ω-like) shape. For comparisons, contiguous party orderings are constructed using four other models, and the results are discussed. One takeaway: a serious warning that the electoral success of a party depends neither on its policy representation capability nor on its left–right orientation. This means that the principles of representative democracy are under stress and the current electoral system is failing to meet its objectives.

Suggested Citation

  • Andranik Tangian, 2020. "Policy Representation Across the Political Spectrum," Studies in Choice and Welfare, in: Analytical Theory of Democracy, chapter 0, pages 405-446, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-030-39691-6_9
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-39691-6_9
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:stcchp:978-3-030-39691-6_9. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.