Territory and electoral politics in Germany

Modern party political competition, as this volume illustrates, occurs in ever more complex settings. Long gone are the days (if, indeed, they ever existed at all) when parties could craft one political package that was suitable for more or less all electoral contests. Parties now have to mould, shape and articulate their demands in a multitude of ways to make them relevant to different sets of voters possessing differentiated sets of interests for elections to different sets of institutions. At the vertical level, federal institutional arrangements have traditionally been used to permit voters to voice their territorially specific interests in substate elections. Long-established federal states (such as the US, Australia, Canada, Germany and Switzerland) have recently been joined by states such as Belgium, the UK, Spain and Italy — to name but four — in creating, or rejuvenating, genuinely significant multilayered institutional frameworks. Increasing divergences in wealth, interests and even identity awareness within nation-states have also prompted parties to mould their political profiles and messages in more subtle and focused ways in order to appeal to electors who rely less and less frequently on the pillars of class and partisan alignments in shaping their votes.