To what extent are the parties immersed in local issues in the local election campaign in Lower Saxony? How do they position themselves in socio-political terms? Three social scientists at the university have created a "map" of the political offer - including regional differences.
In the local election campaign in Lower Saxony, parties on the fringes of the left-right party spectrum - the Left Party and the AfD - are primarily campaigning on national political issues. This is what the social scientists Prof. Dr Markus Tepe, Florian Erlbruch and Michael Jankowski found out when they analysed the local election programmes of the CDU, SPD, Greens, Left Party, FDP and AfD in ten of the eleven largest cities in the state and used their findings to create a map of the political offerings in Lower Saxony. In the run-up to the elections on 11 September, they have now published the graphic and the accompanying report documenting the statistical process.
According to the report, the most important conflict dimension along which the parties map their political offer for the local elections is not the economic left-right dimension as in state and federal elections. The parties differ more in how deeply they delve into local political issues. On the political "map", the SPD, CDU, Greens and FDP are relatively close to each other in this respect, with some distance to the AfD and an even greater distance to the Left, which focuses most strongly on federal policy issues. "These are issues such as income, Hartz IV, care and social justice in general, where the influence of the local level is relatively limited," according to the trio of authors.
The findings on the dimension of "municipal relevance" contain nuances within the parties that differ from region to region, which the social scientists want to analyse in more detail: According to the text analyses to date, the programmes of the FDP, CDU and SPD in Wolfsburg are among those that deal most intensively with municipal issues, as are those of the SPD and CDU in Braunschweig or the CDU and SPD in Oldenburg. While the Delmenhorst CDU also has a decidedly local-policy-oriented programme according to its location in the chart, the gap to the Delmenhorst SPD is clear here, whose programme places the least emphasis on local government compared to the other social democrats. Overall, the programmes of the Left Party have the least reference to local politics - according to the text analysis, the Left Parties in Delmenhorst, Oldenburg and Salzgitter focus particularly strongly on federal politics. In contrast, the AfD programmes show little variation in the graph.
The second most important conflict dimension on which the parties in the Lower Saxony local election campaign can be located is therefore a left-right dimension characterised by social aspects. Issues such as the treatment of refugees and Gender equality take centre stage here, rather than economic aspects. At one end of this axis are the local election programmes of the AfD, at the other end are the programmes of the Left, Greens and SPD, and in the middle are the CDU, FDP and to some extent also the SPD and Greens. Here, too, there are regional differences between the district associations of the parties and the character of their local political programmes: For example, the Delmenhorst Left, the Hanover Greens, the Braunschweig SPD and the Oldenburg Left are located particularly far "left" on the spectrum, while the Göttingen and Wilhelmshaven CDU and FDP are more "right", some distance from the AfD.
"The analysis shows that electoral research also provides new insights into party competition at local level, which differs substantially from federal and state politics," said the Oldenburg social scientists. At the same time, the graphic illustrates the diverse range of options from which the more than six million eligible voters in Lower Saxony can choose on 11 September.