Bereiche | Tage | Auswahl | Suche | Aktualisierungen | Downloads | Hilfe
SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 12: Statistical Physics of Politics
SOE 12.3: Vortrag
Mittwoch, 11. März 2026, 17:45–18:00, GÖR/0226
Analyzing political spaces to understand political realignment: The case of Switzerland — •Eckehard Olbrich1 and Peter Achermann2 — 1Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Leipzig, Germany — 2University Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland
The rise of right-wing populist parties and the preceding emergence of new left and ecological parties beginning at the end of the 70s in the last century if often as the emergence of a new conflict line ("cleavage") [1] related to the transition from industrial societies to post-industrial societies. A fully developed political cleavage corresponds to an alignment of divisions in three layers: 1) the socio-demographic structure (structural layer), 2) the prevalent attitudes, narratives and ideologies (ideological layer) and 3) the political parties and social movements. We will test the theory of new cleavage for the case of Switzerland by analyzing political spaces derived from geographically resolved data on public votes and elections. We would expect the appearance of a new cleavage to be reflected as a new dimension in the political space, thus roughly speaking increasing the dimensionality of the political space (de-alignment) while a subsequent decline of the dimensionality could represent a re-alignment in the sense that the older cleavage gets replaced. While we observe that re-alignment as a decrease of dimensionality in the data, the picture for the de-alignment appears more complicated.
[1] S. Bornschier et al. Cleavage Formation in the 21st Century: How Social Identities Shape Voting Behavior in Contexts of Electoral Realignment. Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Keywords: Political space; Dimension reduction; Social dynamics; Populism