On Wednesday, May 20 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held.
Speaker: Andranik Tangian (WSI in the Hans-Böckler-Foundation, Düsseldorf, and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany)
Title: Is the left-right alignment of parties outdated? The German case
![On Wednesday, May 20 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held.](/data/2015/05/25/1096951934/8sem.png "On Wednesday, May 20 the all-Russian seminar "Mathematical methods of decision analysis in economics, finance and politics" was held.")
Abstract
The advocates of modern western democracy promote the viewpoint that the class division of the society is becoming outdated. We attempt to disprove this statement with an example of 28 German parties who participated in the 2013 federal election. The official party positions on 38 policy issues are considered and the parties are located in this 38-dimensional political space. The statement in question, that there is no predominant political axis, would imply that the parties are scattered homogeneously, making a ball-shaped cloud of `observations’. However, the Prime Component Analysis shows that the parties constitute a thin ellipsoid whose two longest diameters explain 83.4% of the total variance. The following party ordering is the left–right axis rolled in a circumference, making the extreme left and extreme right ends meet. Basing on this empirical evidence, we conclude that neither the left–right characterization of parties nor the class opposition is outdated.
Additional materials:
The advocates of modern western democracy promote the viewpoint that the class division of the society is becoming outdated. We attempt to disprove this statement with an example of 28 German parties who participated in the 2013 federal election. The official party positions on 38 policy issues are considered and the parties are located in this 38-dimensional political space. The statement in question, that there is no predominant political axis, would imply that the parties are scattered homogeneously, making a ball-shaped cloud of `observations’. However, the Prime Component Analysis shows that the parties constitute a thin ellipsoid whose two longest diameters explain 83.4% of the total variance. The following party ordering is the left–right axis rolled in a circumference, making the extreme left and extreme right ends meet. Basing on this empirical evidence, we conclude that neither the left–right characterization of parties nor the class opposition is outdated.
Additional materials:
Slides (PDF, 3.50 Мб)
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