Cleavage structures and voter alignments within nations : explaining electoral outcome in Germany s Counties, 1998 to 2005

Abstract

Despite its general popularity the cleavage theory has only rarely been used to explain regional electoral outcome. In this paper we examine whether a region's social structure and its electoral results are systematically linked. To analyse the political preferences of an entire regional electorate in a single step, electoral results are translated into a left-right position for each region using Gross and Sigelmann's concept of the ideological centre of gravity. We then analyse whether the left-right differences between the regions can be traced back to the socio-structural composition of regional populations. We apply this approach to the results of the 1998, 2002, and 2005 German federal elections in all of the 439 counties. Our results suggest that the church-state cleavage and the postmaterialism cleavage shape electoral outcomes in western regions considerably, but that the impact of the capital-labour divide has mostly vanished. Contrarily, eastern electorates seem largely guided by a centre-periphery cleavage that is rooted in a leftist mentality, but not much else.