GermanParties2009: Choice among German Political Parties

Description

Preferences of 192 respondents choosing among five German political parties and abstention from voting.

Usage

data("GermanParties2009")

Arguments

encoding

latin1

Details

A survey was conducted at the Department of Psychology, Universit�t T�bingen, in June 2009, three months before the German election. The sample was stratified by gender and age (younger versus older than 30 years) with 48 participants in each group.

The parties to be compared were Die Linke (socialists), Die Gr�nen (ecologists), SPD (social democrats), CDU/CSU (conservatives), and FDP (liberals). In addition, there was the option of abstaining from voting (coded as none).

Participants were presented with 15 pairs of options in random order. On each trial, their task was to choose the party they would rather vote for at an election for the German parliament. A given participant compared each pair in one order only, hence the NA's in ordered.pref.

In order to minimize response biases, the pairs of options were read to the participants one at a time. Participants made their choices by crossing either First Option or Second Option on an anonymous response sheet.

The interviewers were Psychology Master's students who collected the data for course credits. Since they mainly interviewed people they knew, the results are not representative of the political opinions in Germany. As far as the winner of the survey (Die Gr�nen) is concerned, however, the results agree with the outcome of the election for the T�bingen voters.

The results of the election on September 27, 2009 (number of so-called Zweitstimmen in percent) were:

lrr{ Germany T�bingen Die Linke 11.9 8.5 Die Gr�nen 10.7 27.9 SPD 23.0 21.1 CDU/CSU 33.8 23.0 FDP 14.6 13.9 Others 6.0 5.7 }

The voter turnout was 70.8 percent in Germany and 80.5 percent in T�bingen.

Examples

Run this code

data("GermanParties2009", package = "psychotree")
summary(GermanParties2009$preference)