Evaluation of German parties and coalitions by methods of the mathematical theory of democracy

The paper continues author’s studies on applications of the mathematical theory of democracy. Five German leading parties and their coalitions are evaluated with indices of popularity and universality to show how well they represent the electorate. The evaluation goes beyond the information on election results and uses an operational representation of party manifestos. It is shown that at the time of German parliamentary elections 2005 the most representative was the Social Democratic Party (SPD) which was however behind Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the best coalition could be the coalition SPD/Green/Left-Party which failed because of disagreement between party leaders.