(Earthquake; 01-03; p.3)

Developments

With all needed awareness of over-generalisation some significant developments can be made out:

• Lower Saxony is a mainly agricultural state covering a relative large area of Germany and receives transfer money from other states; on the contrary, Hesse has a strong financial, services and industrial region stretching roughly between Frankfurt, Offenbach, Wiesbaden and Darmstadt and gives some of the transfer money that Lower Saxony (among other states) receives.
Although there are strong structural differences between the two states, the respective majority of voters preferred the Christian Democrats.

• The main reason for voting the CDU has been - according to opinion polls of Infratest Dimap, one of the bigger German institutes specialised in elections - the programme offered. Voters of the SPD, however, made their choice mainly because they are traditionally bound to this party.
More specifically, the scientists found out that about a half of the CDU's voters linked their choice to the party's programme, a quarter to the leading candidate and a last quarter to traditional bindings. Voters of the SPD cannot be categorised as easily, but a dominance of traditional bindings can be stated: in Hesse 42 percent and in Lower Saxony 35 percent of these voters named it as main reason.

• In contrast to former times, preferences of voters do no longer relate to established patterns of election behaviour: the CDU had more voters in all groups defined by age, education and occupation.

• In both states, federal politics were at least as important for the election as state or "Länder" politics: voters do differentiate between relevant topics on the respective levels on the one hand, but they also know about the fact that state politics are pre-conditioned by federal politics. E.g., foreign policy topics which were part of some election campaigns did not have significant influence, whereas the economic policy of the federal government did. (read on here)