Research question/goal:

Researchers apply various methods to identify policy or ideological spaces. In this project we tried to identify an ideological space for the German party system by relying on voters' evaluations of parties and leading politicians. The main result of the analysis was that the general left-right dimension could be identified with these data, but the second dimension which was necessary to describe differences in the evaluations was not necessarily linked to ideological or policy differences between parties or politicians.