In the run-up to the 2017 German federal elections, intense internal debates over positioning have begun within the political parties. Party strategists have to take into account a vast array of contradictory factors: What will be the political mood in September 2017? What issues will dominate the political agenda? On which policy fields will voters attribute competency to the party and its figure-heads? What do the base, the wings, the core constituencies want? Which potential coalition seems most promising to credibly claim a shot at forming the next government?

None of these questions are new to campaigners. What did change over time is the way political parties seek to tackle these challenges. In the more homogeneous German post-war society, mobilization of core constituencies was what decided elections. Accordingly, political parties aimed to mobilize their core constituencies with elaborate party and grassroots organizations. Today, deindustrialization has effectively eroded many of these socio-cultural milieus, provoking considerable voter fluctuations between the political camps. The workers and "the common man" for example, formerly core constituencies of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), are now overwhelmingly voting for conservative or right-wing populist parties. Conversely, civil servants and public employees, a formerly conservative constituency, are voting for social democrats today. While voter turnout is falling year after year, the number of swing voters has gone up sharply. Political parties reacted to this trend by focusing less on core constituency mobilization, but by concentrating on winning over the swing voters at the center ("Neue Mitte"). In the previous elections in 2012, the Christian Democrats (CDU) even successfully fielded a demobilization campaign, securing a comfortable win by asymmetrically mobilizing its core constituencies and winning swing voters at the center. Instead of grassroots organizations, focus groups and opinion polls became the instruments of choice. However, the massive disruptions of the electoral landscapes in the United States (Trump and Sanders insurgencies) and Europe (rise of right-wing populist parties) have shown the limitations of such electoral engineering. What may look like a clever tactical move can easily be perceived as a lack of authenticity. In the worst case scenario, the party may lose both core constituencies as well as swing voters.

Despite all the talk of "the end of ideologies", parties cannot position themselves arbitrarily on the political map. Their own historical path, and even more importantly the socio-cultural life world of their supporters matter. These life worlds should not be understood as socio-economic classes but as discourse communities who share central promises and historical experiences, myths, worldviews and values. These discourse communities are not static, but change over time. However, compared to the sometimes abrupt positional changes of party leaderships, discourse communities change their positions pace of generational changes. Hence, if for tactical reasons a political party positions itself outside the lifeworld of its supporters, weak voter turnout and internal quarrels are the likely consequences.

The three dimensions of the graphs

The slides represent three dimensions. First, the official party line as defined by party conventions, programmatic platforms, and leadership committees. Second, the lifeworld of core constituencies, which are defined by the discourses and values predominant in social milieus. And finally the tactical debates between wings, factions and party leaders. The slides are informed by the interdependencies between these three dimensions, and aim to visualize the distortions which may arise between the highly stable lifeworlds and the highly dynamic tactical maneuvers of leaders and strategists. This tool aims at facilitating strategic debates. The exact party positions are based on personal perceptions and of course up for debate.

How were the graphs created?

In June 2016, FES International Policy Analysis published the first visualization of the German political party field with the stated aim of making internal strategy debates known to a wider public. The ensuing debates on social media were fascinating if controversial, and have encouraged us to visualize the party landscape of Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands and France. It became clear, however, that there is a need to clarify once more what exactly this visualization intends to show.

In the Anglo-Saxon literature, the material poles were simply named "Left" and "Right". The material axis reflects the different governance paradigm when it comes to primary and secondary distribution of goods. From a continental, especially German perspective, however, "Left" and "Right" are equally associated with positions which in our scheme would be qualified as „Libertarian“ or „Authoritarian“ on the cultural axis. To avoid further misunderstandings, the material poles are now renamed the material poles as "Egalitarian" and "Elitist", to reflect the primary target groups political parties struggle for in the distributional conflict.

There were questions about the empirical base of this visualization. Discourse analysis, the analytical instrument applied to produce these maps, however, is qualitative, not quantitative tools. If you dismiss the results as „subjective“, please keep in mind the objective of the exercise: to encourage public debate, not to document them academically.

The visualisation of discourses

Some have criticised that the positions of the parties do not reflect their actions in government. Again, two clarifications:First, what is visualized are discourses, not policies. Second, these maps are snapshots of the current discourse landscape. In a dynamic field, the positions of April 2017 are different from those in June 2016, and are likely to have yet again moved in a year from now. To make this dynamism visible, I have added some historical party positions.

What is important to note is that political leaders, party platforms and lifeworlds move at different speed. While the tactical positions of political figureheads (depicted as arrows with quotes) can shift on a weekly basis, party platforms (the boldly coloured dots) moved between party conventions and elections, and the lifeworlds of core supporters (lightly coloured ellipses) over the course of generations. Why is this so important? Different tactical positions result in conflicts between party wings. If the party platform is positioned outside of the lifeworld, however, voter demobilization and even party splits can be the outcome. Arguably, it was the disconnection between the social democratic lifeworld and the "Neue Mitte SPD" which produced the WASG (later merged with Die Linke), and the strain between the Union lifeword and the "Volkspartei der Mitte" which gave rise to the Alternative for Germany (AfD).