Julius Kölzer

Thanks! I had to smirk a bit reading the comment about the center-left being ‘squeezed,’ as the SPD’s vote share in the scatterplots sort of literally looks like it’s bleeding out

Auf Gemeindeebene gibt es bei Industriebeschäftigung aus Gründen der Geheimhaltung seitens des statistischen Landesamts sehr viele missings. Alle Modelle/Plots nutzen immer den jeweiligen Share auf Wahlkreisebene (die kleinräumigste Ebene für diese Daten).

Danke!

A must-read thread
👇

Fascinating thread - one thing that leapt out for me was a formerly dominant centre left party being squeezed by Greens in diverse graduate heavy cities and by the radical right in economically insecure manufacturing towns. Certain patterns keep repeating

Dieser Zusammenhang zwischen dem Anteil des produzierenden Gewerbes und AfD-Stimmen und Stimmgewinnen ist wirklich bemerkenswert stark.

Thanks for reading!

6) Similar to the Greens, the Linke makes gains in larger cities where it already performed above average in 2021. However, these gains are not enough to offset its consistently low vote shares in rural constituencies, leaving it short of the threshold for entering the state parliament.

5) Finally, the FDP: Although liberal Baden-Württemberg is the party’s historic stronghold, it is being almost completely wiped out across much of the state and fails to clear the 5% threshold. The FDP still performs somewhat better in affluent municipalities and Protestant upper-middle-class areas.

Despite announced manufacturing layoffs, SPD vote shares are negatively correlated with industrial employment. However, the state’s industrial areas are dominated by SMEs and have historically leaned CDU (the SPD’s decline in the state’s manufacturing base also appears to have occurred long ago).

However, the relationship between the share of industrial employment and AfD gains is not significantly stronger in areas with SME-dominated labor markets, declining business tax revenues, or higher insolvency rates. Data for 2025 is however not yet available.

Obviously, manufacturing in Baden-Württemberg is largely concentrated in more rural areas. However, also in a simple municipality-level regression model controlling for different spatial characteristics, a higher share of manufacturing employment remains a strong predictor of AfD gains.

While areas with larger manufacturing sectors were already AfD strongholds, the party appears to be making further gains here (often by double-digit percentage points). The CDU also appears to makes modest gains in these places, while the incumbent Greens seem to suffer substantial losses.

The AfD performs particularly strongly in parts of rural Baden-Württemberg affected by prospects of manufacturing layoffs (especially in areas reliant on automotive & mechanical engineering industries). Constituencies with higher manufacturing employment show a very strong shift toward the AfDs.

AfD gains are also notably lower in areas with higher shares of residents with tertiary education. Conversely, this suggests stronger shifts toward the AfD in municipalities with larger shares of low- and medium-skilled workers.

A further increase in support compared to 2021 is found in municipalities with higher homeownership rates. As is typical, the party performs worse in areas where the Catholic milieu is more strongly rooted. However, this negative association is rather moderate.

4) The far-right AfD gains 9 percentage points, expanding its support primarily where it already performed strongly in the last state election 2021. As the scatterplot and the map show, these areas are, unsurprisingly, rather rural and peripheral.

3) The SPD (what remains of it) tends to incur greater losses in the more populous parts of the state. While many accounts emphasize the Social Democrats’ weakness in manufacturing towns in the countryside (more on that later), they also seem to suffer from Green mobilization in urban centers.

Overall, the CDU’s gains appear to be broad-based across municipalities and are therefore only weakly correlated with socio-structural characteristics. Traditionally, CDU support is also stronger in municipalities with high homeownership rates and larger shares of Catholic residents.

2) A mirror image emerges for the gains of the challenging center-right CDU, which are larger in more rural areas. These are often places where the Greens performed above average in 2021 but are now facing losses. However, this relationship is rather weak.

The Greens electoral base is thus shifting somewhat away from rural areas and back toward its traditional urban strongholds that first brought it to power in 2011.

Accordingly, green support and gains since 2021 are more strongly correlated with greater population density. Unsurprisingly, the party also performs better & gains more in municipalities with higher levels of tertiary education (areas with high homeownership are much less favorable terrain).

1) The incumbent (and very centrist) Greens narrowly won the election. This was driven in part by further gains in urban centers & university towns as Stuttgart and Karlsruhe, which were already strongholds in 2021. By contrast, they suffered larger losses in smaller, more rural municipalities.

On Sunday, one of Germany’s largest states went to the polls in a closely contested election. What can we learn from the results & how do they relate to looming deindustrialization in one of Germany’s industrial heartlands? A thread with some decriptive patterns from data on 1,101 municipalities. 🧵

thanks!

Causal inference rule many people don't know about: if your correlation coefficient is above 0.5 or -0.5, you have causality

„Der Prozess findet allmählich sein Ende“ So lässt sich das Desaster der SPD in Baden-Württemberg erklären – und der Erfolg der AfD.

Mit @juliusk.bsky.social sprach ich über BaWü:

Teils enormer Shift zur AfD. Größenordnungen, wie man sie häufig aus Osten kennt. Im Westen „gefestigter, als viele wahrhaben wollen“. SPD zwischen AfD (Arbeiter) / Grünen (u.a. Akademiker, Angestellte) aufgerieben.

www.thepioneer.de/originals/ot...

„Der Prozess findet allmählich sein Ende“ So lässt sich das Desaster der SPD in Baden-Württemberg erklären – und der Erfolg der AfD.

Mit @maximilianbeer.bsky.social von The Pioneer habe ich über die Landtagswahl in Baden-Württemberg und die Verluste der SPD geredet.

www.thepioneer.de/originals/ot...

absolute Mehrheit for wolfgang

snens?