Dresden 2026 – wissenschaftliches Programm
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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 12: Statistical Physics of Politics
SOE 12.2: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 11. März 2026, 17:30–17:45, GÖR/0226
The Statistical Physics of Political Voting in German Parliament — •Moritz Marpe1 and Carolin Dylla2 — 1Technical University Berlin — 2Freie Universität Berlin
We propose a singular value decomposition (SVD) of the German parliament voting records from 2021-2024 to answer the question of how polarised was the legislature during the Ampel administration? Arguably, political polarisation is expressed most prominently between elected representatives who can be stylised in a system of their behavioural voting patterns. We built on the work by Sirovich (2003) and Rees & Lee (2025) who analyse the partisan divide and political voting patterns in the US institutions using frameworks borrowed from statistical physics to investigate the degree of polarisation. Likewise we use the median voter theorem to identify *pivotal voters* tipping collective outcomes along mulidimensional political issues. We propose a SVD to identify the most common voting coalitions following Sirovich (2003) for the last full term of the German Bundestag. Our contribution transfers insights from the bipartisan US-system to a multiparty system in general and the German Bundestag in particular filling a vital gap in the quantitative research on political polarisation.
Keywords: Singular Value Decomposition; Parliamentary Voting; Polarisation; Complex Social Adaptive Systems