Cleavages, Path Dependency, and the Post-Socialist Vote in Germany

Local voting patterns in the former East Germany are quite stable across the post-reunification period.  This paper explains how a persistent electoral map endures in the post-socialist context of weak social cleavages and low levels of party identification.  While some divisions in social class and religion do exist across eastern Germany, this paper demonstrates that more influential than those divisions on local-level election results are legacies of party formation processes from the transition period at the state and local level.  Drawing on original local-level data about party formation in eastern Germany’s five states and interviews with party leaders from 1990 to the present, I find that the electoral geography of post-socialist Germany is more a function of historical path dependence than contemporary political reality.