Owing to the rapid rise of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the public and academia seldom turn their attention to the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD) anymore. The fact that the NPD has maintained its electoral support and continues to be represented at the municipal level is frequently neglected, however. This does not apply to the same extent to all municipalities, though. Based on a most-similar-case-design, the article analyzes the conditions of the NPD's electoral success in Saxon municipalities in the 2013 German federal elections. Using macro data on 438 Saxon municipalities and applying spatial errors models, the analysis tests 14 hypotheses. These hypotheses were derived from three groups of factors: cultural demand-side, materialistic demand-side and internal supply-side variables. The results indicate that cultural factors have the strongest impact on the NPD's electoral success in Saxon municipalities, whereas the effect size of materialistic factors is conditioned by other variables. Overall, the findings illustrate that the NPD largely benefits from favorable contextual conditions at the municipal level. The party's ability to influence its electoral success itself are limited, however.
Choosing the “right” party has been especially challening for German voters due to considerable changes in the German political landscape, with the AfD’s rise in 2013 being just the tip of the iceberg. The chapter aims to answer the question of how these changes have influenced attitude-consistent voting in Germany and specifically whether the reasons for (in-)consistent voting have changed between the German federal elections of 2009, 2013, and 2017. Using GLES cross-sectional survey data and online tracking surveys, the chapter suggests that, regardless of the crises and the rise of a new political actor, most German voters voted (or would have voted) consistently between 2009 and 2017. In 2009 and 2017, inconsistent voting was strongly associated with low levels of political knowledge. By contrast, in 2013 inconsistent voters were primarily dissatisfied with democracy and the political elites and sympathetic to the AfD.
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