German Politics

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Becoming Mainstream? The Emergence of Digital

Policies in German Regional Party Politics

Markus B. Siewert & Pascal D. König

To cite this article: Markus B. Siewert & Pascal D. König (2021) Becoming Mainstream? The
Emergence of Digital Policies in German Regional Party Politics, German Politics, 30:4, 583-604,
DOI: 10.1080/09644008.2021.1890040

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Becoming Mainstream? The Emergence of Digital
Policies in German Regional Party Politics

MARKUS B. SIEWERT a n d P A S C A L D . K Ö N I G

Debates on the future trajectory of Germany’s digital transformation have

recently entered mainstream party politics. Rather than forming a coherent
trend, however, some parties have begun to signal a much stronger commitment
to digital policies than others. Drawing on the issue competition literature, we
address two questions: First, which parties strongly emphasise digital policies
in their policy portfolios, and do they exhibit clear commonalities? Second, is
there a uniform tendency or are there systematic differences regarding the
aspects of digital change that these parties emphasise the most? Our evidence
points towards a negative status quo rather than being a winner of the political
game as a necessary condition for parties to show major shifts in their policy
portfolios. We also find a trend of homogenisation regarding the issue areas
in which digital policies are emphasised. The studied parties thus seem to
have a shared understanding about what matters most, rather than systemati-
cally taking up digitisation on issues on which they already have issue owner-
ship. Altogether, our analysis sheds light on how digital policies as an
emerging topic gain traction on the supply-side of party politics.

INTRODUCTION

Addressing the socio-political and socio-economic repercussions of the digital trans-

formation is not only an important task for policymakers, but issues linked to digital
policies are increasingly entering the realm of party politics. Germany seems to be a
particularly interesting case in this regard since previous research has shown that
when compared to those in other countries like the United Kingdom, France, or
Italy, German parties pay much more attention to digital policies in their electoral
manifestos (König and Wenzelburger 2019). However, the weight which German
parties assign to issues associated with the digital transformation is not uniform but
varies significantly, similar to what has been found for other policy dimensions (Bräu-
ninger et al. 2020; Kortmann and Stecker 2019; Müller 2013).
There are signs that digital policies are making it into the mainstream of German
party politics when looking at how the major parties, i.e. AfD, CDU/CSU, FDP, the
Greens, the Left, and SPD, have taken up this topic.1 Figure 1 gives an overview of

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2021

German Politics, Vol.30, No.4, 2021, pp.583–604
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644008.2021.1890040 © 2021 Association for the Study of German Politics
584 GERMAN POLITICS

FIGURE 1
I SS U E E M P H A S I S O N D I G I T A L P O L I C I E S A T G E R M A N L Ä N D E R E L E C T I O N S , 2 0 1 1 – 2 0 1 9 .

Note: Own compilation. The unit of the x-axis is the relation of identified sentences addressing an issue associated with digi-
tisation to all sentences in an electoral party manifesto.

the salience of digital policies in party manifestos, with the x-axis representing the
share of sentences that refer to aspects of digitisation (see section three for details)
at German Länder elections during the 2010s. The black triangles highlight the
mean salience score in an election, whereas the dispersion can be read from the visu-
alised standard deviations (horizontal lines), as well as from the dots representing indi-
vidual parties.
Two trends stand out. On the one hand, the mean issue emphasis has markedly
increased over time, from between 1 and 2.5 percent in the 2011 election cycle to
above 5 percent in more recent elections. Nota bene: this trend is not some minus-
cule change. Rather, digital policies have reached similar importance as registered
for established issues such as taxes, law and order, or European integration
(Dolezal et al. 2014, 66; Bräuninger et al. 2020, 58). It thus seems we are witnessing
a notable adjustment in the composition of party policy portfolios as German parties
take up digital policies into their manifestos. On the other hand, this change is not
uniform across parties; variation in issue emphasis has even increased over time,
with some parties strongly pushing ahead and distinguishing themselves from their
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 585
competitors through taking up aspects of digital change, while others evidently lack
behind.
Based on these observations, we address two questions in this article: First, who are
these parties that stand out through signalling a strong commitment to digital policies in
their policy portfolios? Therefore markedly distinguishing themselves from other
parties? Given their exceptional behaviour, do they exhibit discernible commonalities?
Drawing on assumptions from the issue competition literature (Green-Pedersen 2007;
Hobolt and de Vries 2015; Kraft 2018; Siewert and König 2019; Somer-Topcu 2009;
Spoon, Hobolt, and de Vries 2014; Wagner and Meyer 2014), one would expect that
such party behaviour is tied to their status in party competition, specifically whether
they are winners or losers of the political game. We examine this aspect with regard
to the parties under study.
Second, we investigate how digital policies enter party competition by looking
at the issue areas to which these policies are linked. Specifically, we ask whether
parties innovate their policy portfolios by attaching digital policies to their
parties’ core issues, i.e. differentiating themselves from each other, or whether
we see that different parties converge on similar issue areas? To answer the
two guiding questions, we measure the weight of different aspects of digitisation
via a content analysis of party manifestos. These are commonly used in research
on issue competition, as they are the key programmatic documents on the supply-
side of party politics (Dolezal et al. 2018; Eder, Jenny, and Müller 2017; Harmel
2018).
From the perspective of party politics, digital change is a particularly interesting
topic to study. As an emerging topic that cuts across various established issue areas,
digital policies are still highly amenable to agenda setting and problem definition
efforts. Therefore, parties which strongly set themselves apart with a commitment to
digital policies in their core programmatic documents are likely to play a critical
role in shaping how this topic enters party competition –and the larger political dis-
course. Knowing more about which kind of parties adapt their policy portfolio and
which new positions they adopt, therefore sheds some additional light on one of the
core questions of issue competition (Abou-Chadi and Stoetzer 2020; Adams et al.
2004; Janda et al. 1995; Somer-Topcu 2009; De Vries and Hobolt 2012).
All in all, our analysis offers insights on how digital policies as an emerging
topic gains traction on the supply-side of party politics – similar to the rise of
environmental policies in the 1980s – by examining a small subset of parties that
address digitisation much more than their competitors. In doing so, we add to the
literature on issue competition which has, up-to-now, mostly focused on established
issue areas. The analysis below probes whether key assumptions from this field also
hold for an emerging topic like digital policies, whose fate in party politics is still in
limbo. We furthermore present data on how digital policies are added to the policy
portfolio of parties, providing one of the first empirical studies on how digitalisation
is taken up in party politics.
This article proceeds as follows: The next section draws on the issue competition
literature and applies it to digital policies as an emerging topic. The section identifies
the strategic dilemmas that parties can be presumed to face; it formulates expectations
about i) when parties are most likely to strongly commit to an emerging topic, and ii)
586 GERMAN POLITICS

about how parties link it to established issues in their policy portfolios. After a descrip-
tion of the research design, sections four and five present the empirical results, followed
by a conclusion containing a summary of our main findings and an outlook for future
research.

ISSUE COMPETITION AND DIGITAL POLICIES

At the heart of the issue competition framework lies the idea that the salience of issues
matters for the electoral appeal of parties (Budge 2015; Dennison 2019; Green-Peder-
sen 2007; Petrocik 1996). If those issues are salient on which a party has a reputation of
being credible and competent, this party finds favourable conditions for attracting voter
support. Accordingly, a party has an incentive to make and keep those issues salient on
which it has an advantageous standing. If issues that are salient at a given time are
unfavourable for a party, it can expect to improve its situation by emphasising other,
latent issues in order to effect a change on the public issue agenda.
A similar general expectation stems from the issue entrepreneurship model.
Although it is rooted in positional party competition models – unlike the issue compe-
tition framework – issue entrepreneurship too presumes that parties have an incentive
to mobilise a policy dimension that lies dormant in party competition, if this improves
the status quo for them (Carmines and Stimson 1986; De Vries and Hobolt 2012;
Wardt, De Vries, and Hobolt 2014). If voters already care at least to some extent
about such a latent policy dimension and take clearly opposing positions on it, mobilis-
ing this dimension can result in a novel dominant conflict axis.

Issue Competition on Digital Policies as an Emerging Topic

Research which focuses on parties who specifically try to influence issues, has largely
been studied with regard to topics that are already an established part of the political
agenda, and/or have suddenly risen to great importance (Abou-Chadi, Green-Pedersen,
and Mortensen 2020; Spoon, Hobolt, and de Vries 2014). However, with a rather novel
and emerging topic like digitisation, the setting is slightly different (König and Wen-
zelburger 2019; Siewert and König 2019). Parties have barely been able to develop
a credible image of issue ownership. Moreover, digitisation is not (yet) an issue dimen-
sion with a clear positional aspect and opposing policy orientations. Also, it could be
conceived as both a distinct issue linked to challenges resulting from specific socio-
technological changes, i.e. digitisation as its own issue area, or as a super-issue
which touches upon and cuts across almost all established issue areas, be it the
economy and employment, law and order, healthcare, or education.
Despite these particularities, strongly emphasising an emerging topic like digitis-
ation in a party’s policy portfolio is akin to emphasising established issues and has
similar relevance for the political game. For one, mobilising a latent issue and trying
to develop a credible image on it requires resources. Given that resources in form of
money, personal or expertise are usually scarce, parties need to make strategic
decisions on what they want to spend their limited resources on (Kraft 2018;
Wagner and Meyer 2014): In the present case on non-digital aspects of an issue that
already play an important role in party competition, or instead on digital aspects
which might or might not become salient. Similarly, politicising a new issue, together
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 587
with the shift in attention that this entails, might sound unconvincing to the electorate or
may water down a party’s core messages (Abou-Chadi and Stoetzer 2020; Hobolt and
de Vries 2015). Finally, parties are overall rather reluctant to making strong changes to
their policy portfolio, adapting it more incrementally instead (Walgrave and Nuyte-
mans 2009). In the issue competition model, signalling a strong commitment to an
emerging issue, therefore, seems to be promising for a party only if this behaviour
can be expected to pay off. In other words, the issue in question would at least need
to have the potential to become salient in the near-term future. The question then is
to what extent this can be said for digital policies?
There are, indeed, signs which herald a rising salience of digital policies. Figure 2
illustrates the relevance of digitisation in public opinion and the media. As can be seen
from the left-hand panel of Figure 2, digitisation, at present, plays a minor role in the
electorate. Even in 2013, the year of the Snowden revelations, the share of respondents
naming digitisation among the most important topics was only 2.1 percent. To put this
into perspective, pensions/old-age benefits as an issue that is of continued relevance in
society is still much more salient among the public, with between 5 and 16 percent
naming it as the most or second-most important topic.2
However, we do see an increase in salience in the larger public in more recent years.
The right-hand panel of Figure 2, shows the relevance of digitisation in the mediatised
public sphere based on the number of hits from an article search in the media archive of
Spiegel Online. By this measure, the relevance of digitisation shows a remarkable
upward trend, with a take-off in 2015. By 2017, the salience of digitisation reached
a similar level as pensions, even surpassing it in 2018.

FIGURE 2
ISSUE SALIENCE IN PUBLIC OPINION AND THE MEDIA.

Note: Figure based on Forschungsgruppe Wahlen (2020) survey data (public opinion) using responses to most and second-
most important topics and article numbers from Spiegel Online search (media public).
588 GERMAN POLITICS

Conditions under Which Parties Might Turn to Digital Policies to Innovate their Policy
Portfolio
The data thus points towards a strategic dilemma for the German parties: On the one
hand, there are clear signs that the relevance of digital policies is on the rise in the med-
iatised public sphere and among opinion leaders. On the other hand, it is not clear when
the topic becomes salient in the electorate. Against this backdrop, making notable
changes to the makeup of one’s policy portfolio by betting on digitisation as an emer-
ging issue can be regarded as a political gamble. If an issue indeed becomes relevant in
the short term, a party might be able to reap electoral gains due to its commitment to
that issue giving it an edge over its competitors. If, however, the issue remains dormant,
the change in the policy portfolio was at the very least a waste of energy, time, and
resources (De Vries and Hobolt 2012; Hobolt and de Vries 2015; Wardt, De Vries,
and Hobolt 2014).
The same rationale holds in our context, where parties distinguish themselves from
their competitors with a markedly stronger commitment to digital polices. This may
well give them a political advantage, once the relevance of digitisation in public
opinion increases. These parties can then credibly point to their advocated policy port-
folio and present themselves as vanguards of digital change. However, they may also
end up wasting precious resources and reducing their electoral appeal by diluting their
policy portfolio. Since some parties apparently take this risk, the question is under
which conditions do we expect parties to do so?
A recurring central argument in the literature is that when parties face a negative
status quo in the political arena, they are willing to make drastic changes in their
policy portfolio (Abou-Chadi and Stoetzer 2020; Adams et al. 2004; Janda et al.
1995; Somer-Topcu 2009; De Vries and Hobolt 2012; Wardt, De Vries, and Hobolt
2014; Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009). The basic logic behind this assumption is
that parties have strong incentives to change their advocated policies if their current
portfolio does not attract (enough) electoral support. In short, if the status quo is
already perceived as costly by a party this increases its inclination to engage in risky
choices, such as investing in an emerging issue.
Party competition research usually considers vote and/or office motives (seminally,
Müller and Strøm 1999), when mapping out the linkage between an unfavourable pol-
itical context and party manifesto change. For instance, a range of studies highlight that
parties, suffering vote losses in an election, show a greater readiness to make substan-
tial changes to their policy portfolio in the subsequent election cycle. They take vote
loss as a sign of competitive pressure and as a cue that the electorate is moving
away from a party (Abou-Chadi and Stoetzer 2020; Adams et al. 2004; Hobolt and
de Vries 2015; Janda et al. 1995; Somer-Topcu 2009). As a result, parties are expected
to show a greater readiness to change their policy portfolios, irrespective of whether
this means shifting the issue salience to established issues or taking up emerging
ones like digital policies.
Electoral pressures that may drive parties to invest in digital policies can further-
more be presumed to stem from the success of a competitor with a policy platform
heavily based on digitisation. It has been shown that parties converge on successful
competitors or imitate changes in competitors’ policy portfolios (Abou-Chadi and
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 589
Stoetzer 2020). Accordingly, one would expect that successes of the Pirate Party,
which was created as an internet policy party with a strong emphasis on digital
issues, create pressure for other parties to take this topic seriously and thus commit
to it (Siewert and König 2019).
Other contributions suggest that it matters whether a party holds office, since
parties in opposition or without coalition potential have more incentives and leeway
to abruptly shift their policy agenda. From this perspective, opposition parties need
to make more promises in their manifestos and simultaneously cannot be held respon-
sible if they do not deliver what they propose (Walgrave and Nuytemans 2009).
Moreover, opposition parties are less constrained by the extant political agenda as
they are – again, unlike the government – not expected to deal with all issues that
are on the agenda (Green-Pedersen and Mortensen 2010). Our first hypothesis is
thus as follows:
H1a: Parties that face a negative status quo in the electoral arena are most likely
candidates for adapting their policy portfolio and showing a dramatic shift in
issue salience assigned to digital policies (loser-argument).
In a nutshell, the above arguments can be summarised that ‘if it isn’t broken, do not fix
it’ (Janda et al. 1995, 174). More recent studies on why parties change their policy port-
folios, however, make the argument that parties which are already or likely to be in
government are more willing to change their policy portfolio in manifestos. On the
one hand, larger parties usually possess more resources in the form of money, expertise,
and organisational capacities, allowing them to maintain a larger programmatic portfo-
lio. In other words, large parties can keep their focus on established issues they already
own, while simultaneously trying to create a positive reputation on new ones (König
and Wenzelburger 2019; Wagner and Meyer 2014). On the other hand, it is argued
that emphasising a new issue at the expense of more established ones is more likely
to pay off for large parties, since they are more likely to reap the gains from setting
issues on the agenda once they are in government. Because larger parties have
higher vote and office aspirations and are more likely to be in government, they face
better prospects in the future to profit from public investments into areas such as infra-
structure, economy, and human capital formation (Kraft 2018). Against this backdrop,
we can formulate the following alternative hypothesis:

H1b: Parties that are in government or enjoy large electoral support in the elec-
toral arena are most likely candidates for adapting their policy portfolio and
showing a dramatic shift in issue salience assigned to digital policies (winner-
argument).

Adding Digital Policies to the Established Policy Portfolio

The previous section has discussed potential reasons why parties might shift their atten-
tion from one election to another by emphasising digital policies as an emerging issue.
Our second question concerns the content of their policy portfolios. As outlined above,
digitisation cannot merely be reduced to a distinct issue area, but cuts across virtually
all established policy areas. In other words, parties can advocate a wide range of con-
crete digital policies under the label ‘digital transformation’. Consequently, greater
590 GERMAN POLITICS

emphasis on digitisation in one’s policy portfolio does not necessarily have to be to the
detriment of other issues, but rather will often occur precisely within established issue
areas like education, economy, or consumer protection.
In which policy areas do we expect parties to take up digital policies? The literature
on issue competition again points to two alternate scenarios. On the one hand, there
may be incentives for keeping a certain continuity within existing policy portfolios.
Parties might emphasise those aspects of digital change with which they can draw
on the reputation they have on their ‘owned’ issues (Budge 2015; Green-Pedersen
2007; Green and Hobolt 2008; Petrocik 1996; Walgrave, Tresch, and Lefevere
2015). For instance, a party that has issue ownership in the area of law and order
might accentuate aspects related to cybersecurity or using face recognition to
enhance public safety. Similarly, a party that has previously focused on welfare
could stress the benefits and challenges of digitisation concerning changes in the
labour market. All in all, following the rationale that parties prioritise issues on
which they hold a long-standing reputation of credibility and competence, different
party families are likely to prioritise different aspects of digitisation. If this holds
true, we expect to find systematic differences across parties regarding which issue
areas they attach digital policies to. We therefore formulate the following hypothesis:
H2a: Parties show systematic differences with regard to which issue area(s) they
emphasise digital policies in their policy portfolios (differentiation-argument).
On the other hand, there are also reasons to assume that digitisation is defined similarly
by different parties. It has been shown that while parties generally try to increase the
salience of those issues they own, they also depart from this pattern where issues are
so important that they cannot afford to neglect them (Dalmus, Hänggli, and Bernhard
2017; Green and Hobolt 2008). In a similar vein, certain aspects are likely to be seen as
so central to digitisation that parties cannot ignore them. For instance, given the trans-
formative changes that digitisation brings to production processes and value chains,
parties will hardly be able to avoid talking about the economic potential and repercus-
sions. If this holds true, we expect a rather homogenous pattern concerning how differ-
ent parties incorporate digital policies in their party manifestos. The alternative
hypothesis hence is as follows:

H2b: Parties show systematic similarities with regard to which issue area(s) they
emphasise digital policies in their policy portfolios (convergence-argument).

Research Design
Previous research has shown that in comparison to other European countries, Germany
stands out with the strong role digitisation plays in party competition (König and Wen-
zelburger 2019). This is, however, no uniform trend. As the data presented in the intro-
duction (revisit Figure 1) has revealed, there is considerable variation between and
within the Länder party systems concerning how strongly parties advocate digital
policy in their electoral manifestos. In this regard, digital policies are no different
from other policy areas for which we know that there are discernible differences at
the subnational level (Bräuninger et al. 2020; Kortmann and Stecker 2019).
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 591
In the multilevel system of Germany, the Länder are endowed with a high degree of
regional authority (Hooghe et al. 2016). Whilst the federal and subnational level share
responsibilities across a range of policy fields, the Länder have exclusive competencies
in important areas which are affected by digitisation, such as research and education, or
law and order. The Länder also enjoy considerable leverage in the implementation of
national laws, so that even in areas where the authority rests at the federal level – and
the Länder have only an indirect influence on policies – this does not stop regional
parties from positioning themselves in these areas (Bräuninger et al. 2020, 57–59;
Gross and Krauss 2019; Pappi and Seher 2009). Furthermore, it has been stressed
that German federalism not only fosters competition between the Länder but can
also fuel policy innovations that ultimately inform policies on the federal level
(Benz 2007). This could be either top-down in the sense that ‘subnational parties repro-
duce the programmatic orientation of the party as a whole’ (Müller 2013, 177), or
bottom-up in the sense that policy innovations at the Länder-level are taken up at
the federal level. In short, the German regional level is an important catalyst of
change in the overall political landscape and party politics in particular.
In the present study, we draw on the party manifestos from the two most recent
elections in the 2010s at the German subnational level – with the first round of
elections falling into the time period 2011 as 2015, and the second between
2016 to 2019.3 Electoral manifestos can be considered as the central source to
study the supply-side of politics, which is why they are commonly used to
analyse all kinds of questions related to issue competition (e.g. Abou-Chadi,
Green-Pedersen, and Mortensen 2020; Green-Pedersen 2007; Kraft 2018; Wagner
and Meyer 2014). Although the direct appeal of party manifestos towards voters
might be marginal according to this literature, they are nevertheless core program-
matic documents in the eyes of political parties and candidates. They fulfil a range
of crucial purposes like expressing commitment to a certain policy portfolio and
individual policies, influencing the media agenda or resolving intra-party disputes
(Eder, Jenny, and Müller 2017; Harmel 2018).
Little is still known about the precise strategic intentions which underlie party
manifestos – arguably because of the difficulty of gaining access to the relevant
actors and their motives (but see Däubler 2012; Dolezal et al. 2012). However,
choices about the substance of the manifestos ‘reflect how the party is doing, what
are its main strengths and weaknesses, what sections of the electorate are strategically
important to the party and what kind of post-election relations with other parties it
would like to have’ (Dolezal et al. 2018, 241). We can therefore presume that
clearly discernible changes made to an electoral manifesto are not arbitrary but the
result of deliberate, careful and strategic considerations. Clearly, we cannot uncover
the true strategic motives behind changes in manifestos. We therefore adopt the
common approach in research on the effect of party competition on party politics by
studying observable behaviour. We can then relate it to conditions of party competition
in light of general strategic motives and incentives that parties can be presumed to have.
Moreover, the kind of behaviour that we are interested in, i.e. parties strongly signalling
a commitment to digital policies, is so deviant and extreme in comparison to that of
other parties that it is highly unlikely to be unintentional or happening simply by
chance.
592 GERMAN POLITICS

As already mentioned at the outset, we are interested in how digital policies make it
into the mainstream of German party competition in regional level elections. We, there-
fore, limit our analysis to the six main parties that are represented in Bundestag, i.e. the
AfD, CDU/CSU, FDP, the Greens, the Left, SPD. While this means leaving out the
Pirate Party as the party most closely associated with the topic of digitisation, this
party is of least interest from the theoretical perspective adopted above. The Pirates
were not a party that first addressed various other issues and then has taken up digitis-
ation as an emerging topic. Rather the Pirate Party has emphasised aspects of digitis-
ation from the very start, as it was founded as a single-issue party focusing on internet
policy.
Indeed, if we were to include the Pirates, they would crowd out the other parties we
are mainly interested in because the saliency scores for the Pirates are mostly above the
maximum values achieved by the other parties. At the same time, the Pirate Party rarely
shows strong changes in its emphasis on digitisation. Finally, it should be noted that,
although the Pirates had some impressive electoral successes at several Länder elec-
tions, they vanished almost as quickly as they appeared from the political arena.
This also makes them empirically less relevant as a vehicle that may carry digital pol-
icies to the heart of party competition. However, the Pirates may nonetheless be impor-
tant as a driver of such behaviour by other parties. Specifically, competition from the
Pirate Party may have compelled other parties to address digitisation, as hypothesised
above – an aspect that we will take up further below.
The parties that we select for the analysis are those which show (1) the highest
levels of issue salience concerning digital policies and which at the same time (2)
most heavily increase this salience in their manifestos from the first observed election
to the next. A high-salience score (first criterion) is at least one standard deviation
above the average salience over all parties; a strong increase (second criterion) is
measured as a change in the saliency of digitisation between two elections that is at
least one standard deviation above the average change over all cases. Parties
that satisfy both these criteria allow for a strong test of expectations about why
and how parties take up digital policies as these parties can be considered most
likely cases.
The salience scores are calculated based on extracting sentences in the manifestos
that refer to aspects of digitisation via a dictionary-based approach (see Annex A1). As
already noted above, emphasising digital policies does not have to come at the expense
of established issue areas like welfare or education because references to digital policy
largely occur within issue areas. The weight of digitisation on a manifesto can thus be
interpreted in its own right. After splitting the manifestos into sentences, we identified
relevant sentences using keywords and screened them for false positives. The salience
scores are then calculated as the number of sentences referring to digitisation divided
by the overall number of sentences in a manifesto.
Figure 3 shows the selected parties and illustrates the increase in the salience attrib-
uted to issues of digitisation between the two most recent elections. The depicted scores
reflect remarkable changes in party policy portfolios. The share of sentences in their
electoral manifestos has risen between 7 and 9 percent in the latest election cycle of
the sample, which for most parties is three to four times the level that they exhibited
at the previous election. For instance, the FDP in Thuringia referred to digital policies
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 593
FIGURE 3
PARTIES SHOWING AN EXTREME INCREASE IN SALIENCE CONCERNING DIGITAL
POLICIES.

Note: Own compilation. The unit of the x-axis is the relation of identified sentences addressing an issue associated with digi-
tisation to all sentences in an electoral party manifesto.

in only every 50th sentence of its 2014 manifesto, whereas in its 2019 manifesto, digital
policies make up almost every 10th sentence.4 In short, the parties displayed in Figure 3
all show a highly deviant behaviour which reflects not simply adding a sentence here
and there throughout already long, encyclopaedic manifestos, but mark a significant
adaption of their policy portfolio. It is striking that the majority of the identified
parties are regional branches of the FDP, while the CDU/CSU is represented twice,
the Greens and SPD are included once, and the ideologically peripheral parties, the
Linke and AfD, do not feature among these parties at all.5

WHO PUTS THE SPOTLIGHT ON DIGITAL POLICIES?

We turn first to the question whether the parties, which show a huge jump in their issue
salience concerning digital policies, are either electoral winners or losers of the elec-
toral game. The fact that all selected cases show a stark increase in their issue salience
(design with no variation on Y), enables us to test, whether facing a positive or negative
status quo is necessary for parties to change their policy portfolio. If the winner-argu-
ment is true, the data should indicate that in (near to) all instances the spike in issue
salience goes hand in hand with positive conditions in the political arena. If, on the
other hand, the loser-argument holds, almost all the examined parties should face a
negative status quo, when deciding to shift their policy portfolio towards a new
issue like digitisation.6
594 GERMAN POLITICS

Following the literature highlighting that the status of a party can be judged on mul-
tiple dimensions (Hobolt and de Vries 2015; Janda et al. 1995; Müller and Strøm 1999;
Spoon, Hobolt, and de Vries 2014), we compiled information on the vote and office
situation of the parties in the sample. We first consider whether a party gained or
lost votes in a preceding election. Entering government or dropping out of it after an
election is another palpable change for parties that is arguably perceived as an electoral
win or loss, respectively. Moreover, parties that lack governing experience, or are in
constant opposition and have no realistic chance of becoming a governing party, can
also be considered political losers, whilst parties which are continually part of govern-
ment can be seen as successfully accomplishing their office-holding ambitions. The
same applies to parties that are in a limbo of being in and out of parliament. Finally,
we take into account the presence of a credible challenger, namely the Pirate Party
which threatens to draw important segments of the electorate away from the respective
party. How much of an electoral threat the Pirates pose for other parties not only
depends on their absolute vote share at the previous election but also how large this
vote share is in relation to another parties’ electoral support.
The conditions of party competition summarised in Table 1 indicate that the
majority of parties were clearly not winners in the electoral arena. It does, however,
become apparent that focusing on vote loss as a single factor cannot explain why
parties take up digitisation as an important issue in their policy portfolio. Only four
parties, the Hesse FDP, Saarland FDP, Thuringia SPD, and Thuringia SPD, have suf-
fered substantial losses at a preceding election, i.e. the election before the observed
change in emphasis on digitisation; five parties even registered considerable vote
gains between two and five percentage points. Yet once we expand the perspective
beyond the simple notion of political losers as losing votes at the ballot box, more evi-
dence points in the direction that most parties are indeed driven by unfavourable con-
ditions in electoral competition. Eight of the ten parties are in opposition during the
observed time span, four of which lost their government status in the preceding elec-
tion. The FDP in Thuringia even dropped out of parliament.
Amongst the ten parties, there are only two that retained their status as government
parties, namely the CSU in Bavaria and the SPD in Thuringia. Furthermore, a look at
the governing experience reveals that only the CSU in Bavaria and – to some extent
also the Thuringian SPD and the FDP in Lower Saxony – exhibited a sustained
period in office, whilst the clear majority of parties had no or only marginal governing
experience, highlighting the fact that most parties in the sample are locked in a state of
opposition with poor chances of entering government.
In addition, the Pirate Party posed a particular threat for the FDP in North Rhine-
Westphalia, and the FDP and Greens in Saarland. There, the Pirates were not only able
to reach a considerable segment of the electorate with a vote share of almost 8 percent,
but they were popular amongst a big share of constituencies which used to vote for the
Liberals and Greens (Tagesschau 2020).7 In addition, the Pirates also presented a
serious challenge for the FDP in Thuringia, Hesse and Bremen – though based on a
different rationale. There, the vote shares of the Pirates were much lower, reaching
only 1–2 percent. Yet, in all these cases, the FDP had struggled to pass the critical
5-percent benchmark to enter parliament. Under these conditions, losing just a small
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 595
TABLE 1
CHARACTERISTICS OF PARTIES SHOWING A STARK INCREASE IN ISSUE SALIENCE OF
DIGITAL POLICIES

Vote Government Pirate

loss/gain member over last party Total
(vote Change four legislative vote negative
Party share) Status in status terms share conditions

Bayern CSU +4.3pp. government single-party 4/4 2.0% 0

2013–2018 (47.7%) government
Bremen CDU +2.0pp. opposition stays in 0/4 1.9% 3
2015–2019 (22.4%) opposition
Bremen FDP +4.2pp. opposition re-enters 0/4 1.9% 3
2015–2019 (6.6%) parliament
Hesse FDP −11.2pp. opposition drops out of 1/4 1.9% 5
2013–2018 (5.0%) government
Lower Saxony FDP +1.7 pp. opposition drops out of 2/4 2.1% 2
2013–2017 (9.9%) government
North Rhine-West. +1.9 pp. opposition stays in 1/4 7.8% 4
FDP (8.6%) opposition
2012–2017
Saarland FDP −8.0pp. opposition drops out of 1/4 7.4% 5
2012–2017 (1.2%) government
Saarland Greens −0.9pp. opposition drops out of 1/4 7.4% 4
2012–2017 (5.0%) government
Thuringia SPD −6.1pp. government remains in 2/4 1.0% 1
2014–2019 (12.4%) government but
new coalition
Thuringia FDP −5.2pp. opposition drops out of 0/4 1.0% 5
2014–2019 (2.5%) parliament

Note: Own compilation. The information refers to conditions at the earlier of the two elections at which the
parties are studied. Cells in bold highlight conditions which are in line with the notion of a negative status
quo for a party. The Pirate Party counts as serious challenger if they i) pass the 5 percent benchmark, or ii) if
their vote share poses a threat that the other party might fall below the 5 percent benchmark.

portion of voters to the Pirates would have been dangerous for the FDP and its parlia-
mentary survival.
The remarkable outlier among the ten identified parties is the CSU in Bavaria – and
to a lesser degree the SPD in Thuringia, which, unlike the CSU, experienced sizable
vote share losses. Looking at the examined conditions, the status quo looked rather
bright for the CSU: it had not only gained votes but also consolidated its position as
the ruling party in Bavaria. A plausible explanation lies in the CSU’s long-standing
(self-)perception as the party of ‘Laptops and Lederhosen’ which implies the combi-
nation of conservative and rural values with a strong technological orientation (Hüls-
beck and Lehmann 2007). There is thus a clear basis on which Markus Söder, as the
new head of the CSU, could rebrand the CSU as the party of digital technology,
picking up on the era of technological innovation in the 1990s under Söder’s mentor
Edmund Stoiber.
In summary, all identified parties – with the exception of the Bavarian CSU – are
evidently not winners in party competition but are in one form or another confronted
with a negative status quo. Against this backdrop, the hypothesis that enjoying favour-
able conditions in party competition is associated with parties pushing for new and
596 GERMAN POLITICS

emerging issues (winner-argument), is not corroborated by the data. In contrast, the

presented findings are much more in line with the idea that parties take the risk of chan-
ging their policy portfolio in light of a negative status quo (loser-argument).

HOW ARE DIGITAL POLICIES INTEGRATED IN EXISTING POLICY PORTFOLIOS?

We next explore if the identified parties emphasise similar issue areas when including
digitisation into their policy portfolio, or instead focus on different aspects. The pre-
sented data builds on the set of relevant sentences from each party’s manifesto contain-
ing a reference to digitisation. Each sentence (1,625 sentences in total) was manually
coded along a scheme of 17 thematic categories.8
Figure 4 shows how the parties’ emphasis on digitisation is distributed over differ-
ent aspects of digital policy and how this has changed over the two most recent elec-
tions. The depicted bars illustrating this change between elections, are based on the
party-specific share of sentences belonging to a given category in relation to all sen-
tences coded for the party. The white diamonds reflect parties’ scores before the
change, black bars represent a positive, grey bars a negative change.
We focus only on the most relevant topics, selecting those with an average share
over all the examined parties and elections of at least 3 percent (for the change in
topic importance, see Annex A2; for the entire data table of party-specific changes,
see Annex A3). These average scores are shown as vertical lines in Figure 4. The
issue areas are shown in decreasing order of their overall importance: Privacy and
data protection represent, by far, the most prominent category (21 percent), followed
by E-government (13 percent), education and digital skills (13 percent), and digital
infrastructure and access to it (11 percent). Falling below ten percent but still being
comparatively salient aspects are issues related to the economy (eight percent) and
security (seven percent). In addition, unspecific statements about digital change are
rather frequent, with an average of 11 percent.9 Issues like culture and media,
health, energy, or mobility play only minor roles – somewhat surprisingly because
they are policy areas in which the Länder have considerable competencies.
For three issue areas, we find a strong and consistent pattern of change. Privacy and
data protection experienced a dramatic decrease in overall relative importance from 31
to 11 percent. This direction of change is visible among all examined parties and very
strong among five of them, particularly the FDP and SPD in Thuringia.10 An even more
consistent and similarly strong change is found for education and digital skills, which
has increased by about 14 percentage points overall. A slightly weaker but consistent
upward trend can be observed for economic aspects, which gained about nine percen-
tage points.
For several other categories, the change is less pronounced, although still more or
less consistent. Unspecific remarks about digitisation have overall gained in relative
importance; issues linked to security, but also to culture and media have gone down
to shares of below 10 percent. Similarly, references to digital infrastructure like broad-
band became less important and have levelled amongst all parties at about 10 percent.
E-government is the topic with the most heterogeneous changes among the selected
parties, with some emphasising it more and others paying considerably less attention
to it.
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 597
FIGURE 4
PARTY-SPECIFIC RELATIVE IMPORTANCE OF ASPECTS OF DIGITISATION (IN PERCENT).

Note: Scores are relative frequencies in relation to all coded categories. Own compilation based on the content analysis of all
relevant sentences referring to digital policies in the electoral manifestos.

Overall, the evidence suggests a rather coherent change in those issue areas which
experienced the largest increase in importance. This corroborates the convergence-
argument as parties largely push digital policies regarding the economy, the education
sector, and digitisation in general (unspecific statements). Furthermore, the findings
shown in Figure 4 do not support the idea that different parties would systematically
differ in terms of which aspects they emphasise most, in line with issues they own
and have already a strong reputation on. The differentiation-argument is also
598 GERMAN POLITICS

TABLE 2
SIMILARITY OF PARTY PROFILES CONCERNING DIGITAL POLICIES

Mean distances of one party to all other parties

Election Cycle 1 Election Cycle 2 Change in Dissimilarity

Bavaria CSU 0.47 0.20 −0.28

Bremen CDU 0.31 0.18 −0.13
Bremen FDP 0.39 0.16 −0.24
Hesse FPD 0.33 0.16 −0.17
Lower Saxony FDP 0.33 0.15 −0.18
North Rhine-Westphalia FDP 0.43 0.16 −0.27
Saarland FDP 0.46 0.24 −0.22
Saarland Greens 0.34 0.21 −0.14
Thuringia FDP 0.47 0.15 −0.32
Thuringia SPD 0.41 0.18 −0.23

Note: The table shows how much each party on average differs from all other parties at the last and the
preceding election cycle, and how they changed from one election to the next. For instance, the FDP in
Thuringia had a mean distance to all other parties of 0.47 in the first observed election, which however
diminished to 0.15 in the second election, indicating that its portfolio became more similar to all other parties.
The pairwise differences, which are then averaged, are calculated over all categories for each party and then
divided by the number of issues. The resulting scores are thus scaled from 0 to 1 and comparable between
election cycles.

contradicted by the fact that even regional branches of the same party show massive
differences. For instance, the FDP in Saarland and Bremen display markedly different,
in part completely opposite changes between two elections. Similarly, the CSU in
Bavaria and the CDU in Bremen do not exhibit the same changes in emphasis, since
the former pushed economic issues much more aggressively, while the latter focused
on education and digital skills.
When looking at and comparing parties, the changes may even seem erratic.
However, the data presented in Table 2 further suggests that the parties have
become more similar over time. The scores are calculated based on the distance
matrices for all pairwise party comparisons (separately for the two election cycles in
the sample); they indicate for each party the average distance to all other parties.
What we find is that parties’ profiles regarding the emphasised aspects of digital
policy have grown considerably more similar over time. In part, this convergence is
likely to stem from parties diversifying the aspects of digital change that they empha-
sise. As they spread their references to digital policies in their electoral manifestos, they
are more likely to become more similar with regard to which topics they focus on.

CONCLUSION

Political and societal debates about the future trajectory of the digital transformation
are just at the beginning. Our analysis in the context of the German Länder has exam-
ined parties that are extraordinary in terms of how much they signal a commitment to
digital policies in their core programmatic documents. In the most recent studied elec-
tion cycle, these parties referred to digital policies in close to one-tenth of the sentences
in their electoral manifestos – which corresponds to two or three times the salience of
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 599
digital policies in the preceding election cycle and is comparable to the relevance of
established issues such as Europeanisation or welfare issues.
At present, it is uncertain whether parties can reap electoral benefits from pushing digital
policies as an emerging issue. Parties that strongly mobilise a latent issue under these con-
ditions deserve close attention since such behaviour is extraordinary and because these
parties potentially exert a strong influence on how digital policies enter into party compe-
tition. Our analysis hence offers some first insights into a notable development that has
been going on in German party politics, one that concerns a quickly evolving field of policy-
making with prospects of becoming more central in future election cycles.
We find that almost all analysed parties that have markedly shifted towards a strong
emphasis on digital policies faced unfavourable conditions in the political arena; put
differently, being confronted with a negative status quo seems to be close to necessary
for parties making significant changes to their policy portfolios (Janda et al. 1995, 189).
However, simply looking at the share of vote losses is not enough since only a few
parties suffered severe losses, whereas others lost their status as a governing party or
even dropped out of parliament, whereas again others were trapped in their role as a
constant opposition party or faced an electoral challenger in form of the Pirate Party.
The exception which proves the rule is the Bavarian CSU. It seems that the party proac-
tively modernised its policy portfolio in line with its well-established image as a tech-
nology-orientated party.
Looking at the various aspects of the digital policy that the examined parties have
stressed, we do not find systematic differences that could be interpreted as parties sys-
tematically taking up digital policies more often on issues which they own (Petrocik
1996; Green-Pedersen 2007). On the contrary, we see a convergence in the party pro-
files on digital policies, i.e. regarding the relative weights of the aspects they address.
This is a crucial finding which suggests that the parties under study are developing a,
more or less, homogeneous understanding of what matters most about digitisation.
Specifically, there is a clear trend that issues of privacy and data protection, digital
infrastructure and security have become much less salient over time, whereas topics
linked to economic relevance of the digital transformation and education, both concern-
ing fostering digital skills and digitising education itself, have drastically gained in sal-
ience in party politics.
While it remains to be seen whether this trend towards more uniformity continues
as the digital transformation unfolds in the political, societal and economic sphere, our
findings highlight multiple avenues for future research. For instance, while extreme
cases, per definition, do not allow for generalisations, it remains open whether the
studied parties indeed act as trendsetters and shape the way other parties talk about digi-
tisation, and the aspects they emphasise. It is therefore promising to study whether their
competitors react accordingly at future elections and how the emergence of digital pol-
icies impacts party competition more broadly. Also, it would be worthwhile to explore
more thoroughly what problems parties define, what positions and policies they
propose, and how they talk about digitisation, especially in the areas they emphasise
most. For example, do they frame digitisation merely as a positive development and
opportunity or do they also show an awareness of the challenges associated with, e.
g. the automation of work and potential downsizing? Finally, future work could
examine whether trends in issue salience and substantive topics diffuse horizontally
600 GERMAN POLITICS

and vertically in the German multi-level setting, as diffusion can be observed with
regard to many other policy areas in federal systems. No matter which direction is
taken, in order to understand what shapes the debate over digitisation, future research
needs to remain attentive to those players that initially make major efforts of pushing
the issue higher on the agenda. These parties may come to define digital change in
important ways.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and Louise K. Davidson-
Schmich as editor for their very helpful feedback and suggestions. Special thanks go
to Jochen Müller for his detailed and thoughtful comments on an earlier version of
the manuscript, to Wiebke Baumann for her coding support to compile the dataset
for this article, and to Margareta Maier for her close reading and helpful suggestions
of the revised manuscript. We are also grateful for the comments on previous versions
from the participants of the research seminars at the Bavarian School for Public Policy
at the TU Munich and the Institute for Political Science and Communication at the Uni-
versity Greifswald.

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Goethe University Frankfurt: [Grant Number Early
Career Researchers Program].

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

FUNDING

This work was supported by the Goethe University Frankfurt: [Grant Number Early
Career Researchers Program].

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Markus B. Siewert is postdoctoral researcher at the Bavarian School for Public Policy,
TU Munich (Germany). In his research, he concentrates on party competition, execu-
tive politics and government performance, as well as policies on and governance of
digital technologies. Recent work has been published in Policy & Politics, European
Political Science Review, International Political Science Review, and European Politi-
cal Science.
Pascal D. König is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social Sciences of the
University of Kaiserslautern (Germany). His research mainly deals with policy com-
munication, party competition, and policies regarding digital technologies. Recent
BECOMING MAINSTREAM? 601
work has appeared, inter alia, in West European Politics, Journal of European Public
Policy, Party Politics, Review of Policy Research, and Big Data & Society.

NOTES

1. As we explain in section three, we omit deliberately the Pirate Party from the analysis. Unsurprisingly,
our data shows that the Pirates exhibit a significant higher degree of issue emphasis in their electoral
manifestos.
2. The observable volatility can be attributed to the financial crisis in 2008 to 2011, and the massive
refugee influx in 2015, which put migration and asylum high on the agenda. Yet, even in these
years, pensions are still mentioned by about 5 percent and in years that are not marked by such
crisis conditions, pensions are mentioned as an important topic by over 12 percent of the populace.
3. We gratefully acknowledge the use of the Political Documents Archive at www.polidoc.net (see Gross
and Debus 2018 for a description). We collected more recent manifestos via a web search.
4. This level of emphasis also stands out in relation to the other parties in the sample. For the entire dataset,
the inter-quartile range of digitisation emphasis lies between 2 and 4 percent, and the average change
amounts to slightly less than 2 percent.
5. One reason why the FDP features so prominently among the identified parties could be because of a
strong rivalling Pirate Party. Participating in its first election in 2008, the Pirates became a serious con-
tender only during the 2011/2012 elections but already lost electoral traction in the following years.
Their position as direct competitor to the FDP therefore cannot account for all cases in our sample.
A different explanation could be that the FPD as progressive party welcomes social change, innovation
and economic opportunities, which may make it especially open toward issues related to digital change.
6. This design follows the logic of Mill’s method of agreement to test for necessary conditions, i.e. con-
ditions which need to present for an outcome to occur (Beach and Pedersen 2016, 253ff; Rohlfing 2012,
105ff). It allows for disconfirming theory testing ruling out rivalling hypotheses, but it inhibits us to
make confirmatory claims.
7. In the Saarland, there is a considerable shift in votes from the Greens and FDP to the Pirate Party.
Former liberal voters made up 12.5 percent of the vote gains for the Pirates, while former Green
voters accounted for 9.4 percent of the Pirates gains. In North Rhine-Westphalia, the FDP lost
around 40.000 voters to the Pirate Party, which made up 8.7 percent of their vote gains.
8. A research assistant first coded all sentences and assigned respective categories. A second round of coding
by the authors resolved sentences with unclear references by discussing appropriate coding decisions.
9. This category includes statements in electoral manifestos which mention trends and developments
linked to digitisation in a very generic and abstract manner, e.g., ‘Die Digitalisierung verändert
alles.’ Bavarian CSU 2018 (ID 59). Moreover, we coded statements as unspecific if multiple dimensions
are simultaneously addressed in one sentence; for instance, ‘Immer mehr Bereiche des Lebens – Arbeit,
Bildung, Einkauf, Gesundheit, Haushalt oder einfach nur Unterhaltung – werden von der digitalen Welt
erfasst‘ Hesse FDP 2013 (ID 739).
10. The scandals over surveillance practices by the NSA and BND just before the elections in Thuringia
which were held in September 2014, together with the fact that the Eastern German Länder have his-
torical experience with an intrusive state could explain why privacy was such a prominent topic in the
examined parties’ manifestos. A general reason why issues related to privacy and data protection have
lost in importance might be due to the fact that with the EU General Data Protection Regulation,
adopted in 2017 and passed into law in 2018, this area has become subject to comprehensive regulation.

ORCID

Markus B. Siewert http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8710-531X

Pascal D. König http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9466-4024

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