End of the German Year of Elections

2011 has become known as Germany's Year of Elections due to the number of state elections that took place. The last election took place in Berlin on Sunday, and the somewhat odd results there prompted me to make a post about them. Having studied a bit about Green politics, I've come to view Germany as a kind of barometer for future politics. There are five major parties in Germany, each representing a major political ideology, which in some ways makes interpreting German election results a bit cleaner. It's not like Sweden's eight party parliament wherein the four "Alliance" parties are hardly distinguishable.

The recent run of elections paints a very different picture of the political landscape than the 2009 federal election offered. As expected, SPD recovered from its abyssal 2009 results (23%) thanks to being part of the opposition to an unpopular government. However, its recovery has been nothing like what one would expect. In polls, SPD only gets 29%, which is historically very low.

Of course, the other consideration from the 2009 election was that the three smaller parties, FDP, Greens, and Linke, all showed their best results ever, and it seemed at the time that this trend would continue if the SPD didn't gain momentum. However, their fortunes have drastically changed in just two years. Die Linke's results are probably the most understandable as many of the SPD voters who switched to Die Linke as a protest vote are again supporting SPD. Die Linke was also hurt by the resignation of Lafontaine, who helped popularize Die Linke in the western states. Recent controversies such as several Die Linke members refusing to stand up in honor of those that died trying to escape over the Berlin Wall have also shown Die Linke to be a relic of the past. While the incident appears to not have had much affect on the results of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin state elections, it probably solidified distaste for Die Linke in western states.

FDP saw probably the largest reversal in fortunes. It went its best result ever to polling below the 5% threshold. FDP lost representation in several states this year. Truthfully, I don't have much of an idea of why this happened. The party leader, Westerwelle, certainly became unpopular, but that alone doesn't explain the total collapse of the party in just two years. Between the 2005 and 2009 election, FDP went from 10% to 15% of the vote. It now regularly polls below 5% nationwide. FDP didn't just lose the soft support in gained in 2009 due to protest votes, it has lost a large chuck of its core voters. However, FDP seems to fit into a larger pattern. FDP is a classical liberal party, supporting both economic and social liberalism. Other liberal parties, such as the Lib-Dems in the UK and the Liberal Party in Canada have taken massive hits in recent years.

The big winners this year are the Greens who have greatly increased their support throughout Germany. Support has dropped off a bit since its highs earlier this year, but it still polling at 20%, which is nearly twice what they received in 2009 and is a higher level of support than any party outside of the CDU and SPD has received since 1949. While the Greens are not immune to an FDP style collapse, they do not seem as likely to face one. The trend throughout the world is one of green parties continuously gaining in popularity.

What Germany seems to present is a generational shift in political ideology. A lot of questions have been raised about the failure of social democratic parties to regain the dominance they once had in northern Europe. One theory is that social democracy is no longer relevant in modern welfare states. The working-class union members that made up their traditional base have greatly diminished in numbers as manufacturing declines. It's also at odds with post-materialist culture, wherein a whole generation of people that grew up with all the material wealth they could ever want are now approaching majority and are no longer swayed by an ideology that at its core is materialist, seeking to provide more for the state and its citizenry. Certainly the SPD has recovered since 2009, but it hasn't return to its historical levels of support.

One interesting story from the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern election is the Rügen I election which highlights some of the characteristics of contemporary party relations in Germany. The election in this district had to be delayed for two weeks when the CDU candidate died. A new candidate was selected, but it was discovered that he was a former NPD (far-right) member. The election went ahead, but CDU officially dropped their support for their own candidate. Since the election was delayed, the results from the rest of the state were already known and it was found that if the Greens got over 18.5% of the vote, they could cause the NPD to lose one of their predicted seats. This information was advertised throughout the district, so as to encourage people to vote for the Greens in a district where they somewhat limited support. The campaign worked, but too well. The Greens ended up receiving 25%, which depressed the vote for the SPD so much that SPD ended up losing a seat instead of NPD. The vote shows not only how much the majority of Germans dislike the far-right, but also how willing people are to vote for the Greens even if it's not their first choice.

A more shocking result is the 9% the Pirate Party received in Berlin. It is hard to dismiss this as a protest vote due to just how high the support was and how well spread the support was throughout the city. The district with the least support still gave them 4.7%. While there is a lot of overlap between Pirate Party and Green Party supporters (poll on shift in party support in German), there are some difference. Most Pirate Party supporters had either voted for a minor party or not voted at all in the previous election as well as gaining a lot of former Die Linke and SPD voters. Pirate Party support appears to be coming more from East Berlin as well, particularly in areas with large immigrant populations.

At the moment, it's hard to say if the Pirate Party is part of the same generational shift in political ideology as the Greens. While they both certainly appeal to the younger generation, they may overlap too much to truly distinguish themselves. The Greens could easily incorporate the Pirate Party platform into their own, but the same may not be said of the Pirate Party. It will be interesting to watch their results in the future.

Why Texting is Annoying

The phone I currently have is Estonian, and as such, it doesn't have predictive text for English. While sending a recent text, it seemed to me that the letter that I wanted was always the third letter on the key. So I decided to test if it's true that the most used letters are in a poor position or if it was just a selection bias (i.e. I only notice when the letter is poorly placed).

I found a list of letter frequencies on Wikipedia and decided to compare it to the lay out of letters on a phone number pad. It turns out my assumption was true, the most used letters are in English are in the third position.

All things being equal, with 26 letters distributed across eight buttons, letters in the first, second, and third position should each be used 31% of the time, with those in the fourth position (S and Z) should be used 8% of the time. Instead, letters in first position are used 30% of the time, second position 31%, third position 32%, and fourth position 6%.

So not a huge difference, but it would seem that the speed and ease of texting could be greatly improved by placing the most frequently used letters in the first position. If the letters were arranged in this pattern, instead of alphabetically, first position would be used 64% of the time, second 27%, third 9%, and fourth 0.2%.

I wanted to see how other languages compared, which are the best and worst for texting. However, most have additional characters and I'm not sure how they are used in texting or if replacements are used, such as "ue" replacing "ü" in German texting.