Links oder rechts? Die ideologische Selbstverortung von Wähler: innen und ihre Wahrnehmung von Parteien in Deutschland

July 1, 2022·
Alina S. Dippel
Lukas Hetzer
Lukas Hetzer
,
Axel Burger
· 0 min read
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Abstract
The terms left and right are widely used to describe the political orientation of individuals or parties. They are also employed in social science surveys to determine where people place themselves and where they place political parties in the political spectrum. Based on data from the last twelve years of the Ger- man Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), we show how political parties in Germany are perceived in terms of their left-right positioning, how their ideo- logical positioning has changed over the years, where voters of these parties position themselves, and how this positioning is related to perceived issue-specific positioning.
Type
Publication
easy_social_sciences 67, 19-29
publications
Lukas Hetzer
Authors
Research Associate

I am a Research Associate at the Jacques Delors Centre at the Hertie School and part of the DFG-funded Research Unit “Reconfiguring Europe: Between Competence and Control”, where I work on the Coordination Project. I am also completing my PhD in Political Science at the University of Cologne.

My research focuses on European politics, political communication, public opinion, and crisis governance. I am particularly interested in how citizens, political actors, and institutions respond to political crises and broader political challenges, and how these responses shape European integration, political representation, and institutional change.

Methodologically, I work at the intersection of political science and computational social science. I use large-scale text data, computational text analysis, advanced survey designs, and (quasi-)experiments to study political discourse, public opinion, and political behaviour. I am also interested in building, linking, and analysing large-scale political datasets, particularly institutional text data from parliaments and EU institutions.

Before joining the Hertie School, I worked as a doctoral researcher at the University of Cologne and at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, where I worked on election research and data-based knowledge transfer. I also held research assistant positions at the University of Amsterdam, Ghent University, and Humboldt University of Berlin. I hold an M.Sc. in Social Sciences Research from the University of Amsterdam and a B.Sc. in Social Sciences from Humboldt University of Berlin.

I also teach courses on quantitative methods, EU politics, and crisis politics.

Please feel free to explore my work and get in touch.