Visualizing the Political Spectrum of Germany by Contiguously Ordering the Party Policy Profiles

The data from the German voting advice application (VAA), the Wahl‐O‐Mat, are used to empirically construct and visualize the political spectrum of Germany. This chapter considers the positions of 28 German parties on 38 policy issues declared before the 2013 federal election and associates the parties with the 38‐dimensional vectors of their policy profiles. It empirically tests the thesis about multiplicity of equally significant political dimensions with an example from the German political space, as it is given in the German VAA, Wahl‐O‐Mat. Principal component analysis (PCA) reveals that the parties constitute a thin ellipsoid whose two longest diameters cover 83.4 percent of the total variance. Reducing the model to just these two dimensions, a one‐dimensional party ordering is found, which is exactly the left‐right axis rolled into a circumference, reflecting that the far‐left and far‐right ends of the political spectrum approach each other, although remain distant, resulting in its horseshoe‐like shape.