Partisan attachments and voting behavior in Germany today are more volatile than in the past. This article tests the enduring influence of social cleavages on voting relative to two other factors that account for party performance: path dependent forces and spatial dependence. Drawing on original data from the eastern German states, we explain support for Germany’s main parties in the 2017 federal election. We find relatively weak evidence for continued influence of social divisions for the major parties, but that support for the radical right Alternative for Germany (AfD) did reflect underlying cleavage structures. Additionally, we identify reliable effects of the historical immigrant population on contemporary voting. We also see weak evidence of lock-in political effects associated with German reunification, limited only to the CDU. Most interestingly, we observe powerful and robust effects of spatial dependence for three of the four parties we examine. We conclude that the effects presented here should signal to scholars of parties and electoral politics the need to incorporate history and geography into their analytical frameworks alongside more traditional approaches, since eastern Germany may in fact be less spatialized than western Germany or other country cases because of the homogenizing efforts of the SED regime.

Careful attention to social demographics can be valuable in understanding how patterns of interethnic competition vary between countries, but social demographics can also vary across different levels of social aggregation within the same polity. It may be improper to draw conclusions about the political importance of a particular cleavage based on data from only one level of social aggregation. In South Africa, race is considered to be the primary cleavage around which political competition is organized; intraracial ethnolinguistic cleavages are often dismissed as unimportant, especially at the national level. By focusing the analysis on the local level, this article demonstrates that ethnolinguistic identities are in fact broadly salient in South Africa. These subracial identities appear to influence aggregate political outcomes and individual vote choices. The article thereby offers substantive lessons for students of South African politics and methodological lessons for students of ethnic politics more generally.

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Floor-crossing, the practice of defecting from one political party to join another, is common in democracies. While empirical research has answered a number of questions about the determinants of party switching and the motivations of party switchers, little is known about the consequences of floor-crossing in electoral democracies, especially for the voters who watch their elected representatives 'switch uniforms' in the middle of the game. From 2002 to 2008, floor-crossing was legal in South Africa and defections at all levels of government were numerous. Critics of the country's floor-crossing regime often speculated that rampant defections would drive voters away from the polls and undermine voters' trust and political engagement. This paper uses data cataloguing defections in municipal legislatures to assess the extent to which floor-crossing in South Africa may indeed have alienated voters. The paper finds strong evidence that floor-crossing may have suppressed voter turnout, at least in immediately subsequent elections, but only weak evidence to suggest that floor-crossing had any direct or lasting effect on voters' attitudes about government and the politicians who run it.

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