Who turned their back on the SPD? Electoral disaffection with the German Social Democratic Party and the Hartz reforms

Baptiste Françon ()
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Baptiste Françon: CES - Centre d'économie de la Sorbonne - UP1 - Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

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Abstract: This paper proposes an empirical analysis of the declining support for the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) during Schröder government's second term of office, which was marked by major reforms in the fields of unemployment insurance and labour market policy (Hartz reforms). Drawing on a panel of West Germans, we provide evidence that this disaffection was strongly related to a worker's occupation and that it involved electoral backlash from core blue-collar constituencies of the SPD. In comparison, the impact of other socio-economic characteristics such as the labour market status or the income was less pronounced. We further show that discontent grew stronger among occupations where the risk of unemployment was more prevalent. This suggests that opposition to specific measures that weakened status-securing principles of the unemployment insurance substantially drove electoral disaffection with the SPD during this period.

Keywords: Political economy; economics of voting; social policy preferences; unemployment insurance; social-democracy; Germany; Economie politique; économie du vote; préférences pour les politiques sociales; assurance chômage; social-démocratie; Allemagne (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-ias and nep-pol
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Published in 2013

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00973879

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