The rise of populism and the reconfiguration of the German political space

TL;DR

This paper investigates how the rise of populism, exemplified by Germany's AfD, reconfigures the political space by shifting the main cleavage from economic to cultural issues, using empirical topic modeling and a novel network analysis.

Contribution

It introduces a new method, inter-issue consistency networks, to analyze the evolution of political issue correlations and demonstrates how AfD's emergence creates a distinct cultural right dimension.

Findings

The political space in Germany shows a shift towards a cultural dimension.

AfD appears on a new political dimension related to cultural issues.

A new 'cultural right' issue bundle has split from traditional center-right politics.

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). Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new populism in Western Europe and the US 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. Using the electoral manifestos from the Manifesto project database, 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.