On October the 15th in 2017 the conservative Austrian People’s Party won the national election with 31.47 percent of the popular vote. Thereby outperforming the Social Democratic Party of Austria after more than a decade scoring second place. As a consequence the People’s Party was able to reclaim the chancellorship and enter a coalition with the Freedom Party. Considering their previous result in 2013 with 23.99 percent this was a big win for the People’s Party. So where is this win coming from or in other words who had cast their ballot for the peoples party?
It should come as no surprise that a win for one party means a loss for another, after all people do change their minds and vote for different parties from time to time. This is called an electoral shift, usually electoral shifts are measured with aggregated data. But this time we will take a look at exit poll data and illustrate it with a fancy chart.
You can hover your mouse over this chart and see the proportion of people that have declared for which party they voted in 2013 and 2017. For example if you look at the Social Democratic Party, 64 percent of the respondents that have voted for them in 2013 did also vote for them in 2017. However, 14.33 percent that voted for the Social Democratic Party in 2013 voted for the Freedom Party in 2017. Keep in mind that you should be careful interpreting this data. First of all it represents a random sample of 1,200 people that participated in the Austrian National Election Study. Second the group of people that haven’t cast a ballot in both elections are missing, therefore inferring this result for the entire Austrian electorate is not valid option. Nevertheless, I find it a refreshing change to look at the shift of voting behavior based on exit poll data in contrast to the most commonly aggregated calculations. Perhaps we will explore this subject in more detail in the future.