December 13, 2024
Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) still leads the current government under Chancellor Olaf Scholz – but his governing coalition has fallen apart and he’s called for snap elections. The SPD’s poll numbers have been declining for years. We turned the figures into sound – the lower the note, the worse the result.
This story is inspired by the 2018 project “Der Sound zum tiefen Fall der SPD” by Funke Interaktiv for Berliner Morgenpost.
Thank you to Moritz Klack, André Pätzold, Marie-Louise Timcke, Julius Tröger and David Wendler for their great work and for making the code behind their project publicly available.
See the final result on our Instagram channel: @dw_news
Story by: Kira Schacht and Dustin Hemmerlein
You can find the code behind this analysis in the R Markdown file
SPD-polls-analysis.Rmd. You will need the programming language R to
run it.
To analyze polling results, we extract data from wahlrecht.de, which has been documenting polling results in Germany going back to the 1990s.
This is an excerpt of the resulting dataset:
| datum | cdu_csu | spd | grune | fdp | linke | af_d | pollster |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2024-11-22 | 37.0 | 15.0 | 10.0 | 4.0 | NA | 17.0 | Allensbach (Institut für Demoskopie) |
| 2013-09-22 | 41.5 | 25.7 | 8.4 | 4.8 | 8.6 | 4.7 | Emnid |
| 2024-12-10 | 31.0 | 17.0 | 13.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 18.0 | Forsa |
| 2024-12-06 | 33.0 | 15.0 | 14.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 17.0 | Forschungsgruppe Wahlen |
| 2024-12-03 | 34.0 | 15.0 | 13.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 17.0 | GMS (Gesellschaft für Markt- und Sozialforschung) |
| 2024-12-05 | 32.0 | 16.0 | 14.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 18.0 | Infratest dimap |
| 2024-11-29 | 32.0 | 15.0 | 13.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 18.0 | Verian (Kantar Public, Emnid) |
| 2024-12-05 | 30.0 | 18.0 | 13.0 | 4.0 | 3.0 | 19.0 | YouGov |
And this is what all of these polling results look like over time:
We include data from representative surveys from 8 different pollsters in this analysis, which means there might be multiple results with slight statistical variations for the same time period.
In order to show an average of these polls over time, we use a local regression (LOESS-smoothing) algorithm.
For any given point in time, it considers the closest 2,5 percent of survey values in our dataset and calculates a weighted average of those. The closer to the group average a value is, the more it factors into the calculation. This limits the effect of extreme outliers on our estimated average.
In order to turn the polling average into distinct sounds, we show one data point per month instead of a continuous daily curve. We show the last 20 years, starting with the first month after the federal election in 2005.
This is what the finished chart looks like:
## Warning: Using `size` aesthetic for lines was deprecated in ggplot2 3.4.0.
## ℹ Please use `linewidth` instead.
## This warning is displayed once every 8 hours.
## Call `lifecycle::last_lifecycle_warnings()` to see where this warning was
## generated.
To turn the monthly local averages into sound, we use the free tool DataSonifyer.
If you want to see which presets we used, you can import our
configuration file data/spd-polls-DataSonifyerExport.json into
DataSonifyer with the “Import preset” button at the bottom of the tool’s
page.