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Elektorale Erfolgsbedingungen der NPD in Gemeinden Sachsens

Abstract

Owing to the rapid rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the public and academia seldom turn their attention to the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) anymore. The fact that the NPD has maintained its electoral support and continues to be represented at the municipal level is frequently neglected, however. This does not apply to the same extent to all municipalities, though. Based on a most-similar-case-design, the article analyzes the conditions of the NPD’s electoral success in Saxon municipalities in the 2013 German federal elections. Using macro data on 438 Saxon municipalities and applying spatial errors models, the analysis tests 14 hypotheses. These hypotheses were derived from three groups of factors: cultural demand-side, materialistic demand-side and internal supply-side variables. The results indicate that cultural factors have the strongest impact on the NPD’s electoral success in Saxon municipalities, whereas the effect size of materialistic factors is conditioned by other variables. Overall, the findings illustrate that the NPD largely benefits from favorable contextual conditions at the municipal level. The party’s ability to influence its electoral success itself are limited, however.

Publication
In: Zeitschrift für Vergleichende Politikwissenschaft 12 (2), pp. 365–397