Picking Up the Crumbs? Positions of Small and Marginal Parties in the German Political Landscape Using VAA Data

In recent years, the German party system has undergone a transformation that was long considered to have been resolved since the introduction of the five percent hurdle as an effective guarantor of stability (Poguntke, 2014). However, a process of quantitative and qualitative diversification has recently emerged below this electoral barrier. Small and marginal parties that were previously subsumed under the collective term "others" have increasingly managed to step out of the shadow of power. It remains unclear what consequences the greater visibility of these often overlooked actors will have for the substantive design of the German party system and for German politics in general. While political research has so far provided only few empirical answers to this question, the spatial voting approach offers initial theoretical insights. According to this framework, actors outside the political mainstream must distinguish themselves from their competitors by addressing previously underrepresented issues (Meguid, 2005; De Vries & Hobolt, 2020). Consequently, small and marginal parties are expected to occupy such niches in the political space. However, it remains uncertain whether these theoretical assumptions hold, as small and marginal parties are rarely included in analyses of the German party system (Bartels & Remke, 2023). This exclusion is partly due to conventional methods of exploring the party landscape, which no longer adequately reflect the diversity of their subjects of study. Commonly used tools such as expert surveys and content analyses of party manifestos generally tend to fail to adequately incorporate small parties (Marks et al., 2007; Trechsel & Mair, 2011). This study aims to address this substantive and methodological research gap by contributing to a comprehensive mapping of the German party landscape in the context of the 2025 federal election. Using data from the German Voting Advice Application Wahl-O-Mat, the study seeks to position not only established parliamentary parties but also their under-researched counterparts outside parliamentary representation within a two dimensional political space, to illustrate the resulting interactions between these actors. On the basis of our results, we will discuss among others whether the two-dimensionality is sufficient to adequately capture the entire political landscape in Germany.