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

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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

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  • Baptiste Françon, 2013. "Who turned their back on the SPD? Electoral disaffection with the German Social Democratic Party and the Hartz reforms," Documents de travail du Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne 14019, Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (Paris 1), Centre d'Economie de la Sorbonne.
    • Handle: RePEc:mse:cesdoc:14019
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Political economy; economics of voting; social policy preferences; unemployment insurance; social-democracy; Germany;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D01 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Microeconomic Behavior: Underlying Principles
    • D12 - Microeconomics - - Household Behavior - - - Consumer Economics: Empirical Analysis
    • E26 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Consumption, Saving, Production, Employment, and Investment - - - Informal Economy; Underground Economy
    • C81 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Data Collection and Data Estimation Methodology; Computer Programs - - - Methodology for Collecting, Estimating, and Organizing Microeconomic Data; Data Access

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