European Integration and Party Competition in German Federal Elections
The 2013 German federal election 
Martin Schulz
Leader of the Social Democratic Party
Angela Merkel
Leader of the Christian Democratic Union
Missing an absolute majority for
the Christian Democrats (CDU)
- German politician
- The first female Chancellor of Germany
The Social Democratic Party (SPD)
- German politician
- 2017 to 2018, and has served as a Member of the Bundestag (MdB) since 2017
Future of Europe in German Elections
Data and Methodology
Partisan Differentiation and Contestation
2 things
Alternative für Deutschland(AFD)
- Success motivate the mainstream political parties to become more Eurosceptic
- Germany appeared to be settling into a stable five party system
- In 2013, aggressively eschewed such influences
- How important or salient European integration is for political parties in their national campaigns
- The degree of party competition or polarization over European integration, especially the representation of more Euroskeptical views
34 A key tenet of the “sleeping giant” hypothesis
until the early 2000s, political parties
- The German party system as a
whole also has tended to be the most pro-European among the five countries.
- The net result of all the changes
- The first election in the postwar period that German party has taken a net negative position on European integration
The Salience of European Integration
Focus first on the salience of European integration
Party level salience serves as an indicator of how much party leaders think voters
care about European integration
The “Sleeping Giant” and its Awakening
- Influence on national politics and vote choice through at least the late 1990s
- Dominated by the traditional left-right ideological divide
- The European dimension is independent (orthogonal) from the left-right divide