Die Erklärungskraft von Wahl-O-Mat-Positionen für die Analyse von Koalitionsbildungen

State-of-the-art coalition theories combine the office and policy motivations of political parties to explain the formation of governments in multi-party democracies. In addition to parliamentary seat distributions, the application of such theories also requires valid data for estimating the parties’ political positions. For some years now, voting advice applications (VAAs) have been available in the run-up to many elections and might therefore be considered a reliable tool for determining party positions.

We investigate the viability of Wahl-O-Mat-based party positions for analyzing coalition formation in Germany. Our empirical test includes all German federal and state-level elections from September 2002 through September 2024 for which Wahl-O-Mat versions were available. Party positions compiled by the Manifesto Project (MARPOR/CMP) serve as comparative data. Our results show that, depending on the specific coalition-theoretic model applied, Wahl-O-Mat positions can be more suitable than Manifesto-based reference data for explaining government formation, thus representing a promising approach to identifying parties’ policy positions.