Unfulfilled Promises? German Social Democrats and their Policy Positions at the Federal and State Level between 1994 and 2006

Debus, Marc

doi:10.1080/17457280801987926

Cited by 13 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 56 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is conceivable that political parties used expressive rhetoric to confirm their ideological identities (Hillman, ). Our results are in line with Debus () who describes that the SPD adopted leftist positions on economic policy issues to gratify its core voter clientele. However, when participating in government, the SPD implemented more market‐oriented economic policies than originally promised before elections.…”

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Debt Brakes in the German States: Governments’ Rhetoric and Actions

Potrafke

Riem

Schinke

2016

German Economic Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Primary deficits, however, hardly differed under leftwing and rightwing governments. Revenues of federal taxes were much higher than expected and facilitated budget consolidation. Leftwing governments did not need to run deficits to design generous budgets. It is conceivable that parties confirmed their identity by using expressive rhetoric, but responded to shifts in public opinion after the financial crisis and pursued more sustainable fiscal policies when in office. Terms of use: Documents inJEL-codes: D720, H600, H720.

show abstract

Section: Resultssupporting

confidence: 91%

Debt Brakes in the German States: Governments’ Rhetoric and Actions

Potrafke

Riem

Schinke

2016

German Economic Review

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Moreover, some of the most prominent applications of Wordscores involve analysis of documents produced by political parties to communicate policy positions and promises during election campaigns. Researchers have therefore applied Wordscores to election manifestos to scale parties and empirically test wide range of questions, such as the formation of government coalitions (Linhart, Debus, & Bräuninger, 2010;Proksch & Slapin, 2006), the fulfillment of electoral promises (Debus, 2008), the success of bills in legislatures (Brunner & Debus, 2008), or the choice of putting the EU's constitutional treaty to a referendum (Hug & Schulz, 2007b).…”

Section: Citation Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Validating Wordscores: The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling

Bruinsma

Gemenis

2019

Communication Methods and Measures

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Wordscores is a popular computational text analysis method with numerous applications in communication research. Wordscores claims to scale documents on specified dimensions without requiring researchers to read or even understand the language of the input text. We investigate whether Wordscores delivers this claim by scaling the Euromanifestos of 117 political parties across 23 countries on 4 salient dimensions of political conflict. We assess validity by comparing the Wordscores estimates to expert surveys and other judgmental measures, and by examining the Wordscores's estimates ability to predict party membership in the European Parliament groups. We find that the Wordscores estimates correlate poorly with expert and judgmental measures of party positions, while the latter outperform Wordscores in the predictive validity test. We conclude that Wordscores does not live up to its original claim of a "quick and easy" language blind method, and urge researchers to demonstrate the validity of the method in their domain of interest before any empirical analysis. Computational text analysis is a rapidly growing research field with many applications in political communication research. From using Twitter data to identify the political preferences of citizens (

show abstract

“…15 However, this carries the risk of losing support among the traditional supporters of a particular party. 16 In contrast to the Social Democrats and the Greens, the perceived degree of programmatic change within the two Christian Democratic parties and the Liberals has been smaller since the beginning of the 1990s. While the FDP stressed their market economic orientation and placed less emphasis on their progressive policy positions on social, interior and justice issues, the Christian Democrats highlighted their conservative position on social affairs by bringing issues such as immigration and the Leitkultur (German 'leading culture') to the top of the political agenda during their first years in opposition from 1998 to 2002.…”

Section: Christian Democrats In the New German Party Systemmentioning

confidence: 96%

The Programmatic Development of CDU and CSU since Reunification: Incentives and Constraints for Changing Policy Positions in the German Multi-Level System

Debus¹,

Müller²

2013

German Politics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Like all political parties in modern democracies, the major German parties face challenges caused by changes both in the social structure of the electorate and in value orientations. Generally speaking, parties have to adopt policy positions that take into account changes in the preferences and structure of the electorate in order to maximise their share of votes. This article focuses on the programmatic development of the German Christian Democrats since reunification and discusses the incentives and constraints faced by the CDU and CSU to change their policy positions over time. By discussing patterns of social change, voting behaviour and (intra-)party competition in the German multi-level system, we derive several hypotheses about the programmatic development of the CDU and CSU since 1990. We evaluate these expectations on the basis of a dataset that covers information on the policy positions of all the major German partiesthe CDU/CSU, SPD, FDP, the Greens and the PDS/'Linke' -on the federal and state level in the time period from 1990 to 2011. The results show that there is no distinct trend in the programmatic development of the Christian Democrats. However, we do find evidence to suggest that the German Christian Democrats take the 'setting' of an election into account; that is, they adopt policy positions according to the social structural profile of the electorate when the CDU or the CSU compete for votes in elections for the Länder parliaments.

show abstract

Unfulfilled Promises? German Social Democrats and their Policy Positions at the Federal and State Level between 1994 and 2006

Cited by 13 publications

References 56 publications

Debt Brakes in the German States: Governments’ Rhetoric and Actions

Debt Brakes in the German States: Governments’ Rhetoric and Actions

Validating Wordscores: The Promises and Pitfalls of Computational Text Scaling

The Programmatic Development of CDU and CSU since Reunification: Incentives and Constraints for Changing Policy Positions in the German Multi-Level System

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About