ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the profile of the average Social Democratic Party (SPD) voter and the efforts to gain more support among three of several key voter segments—youth, citizens’ groups, and church communities. Socioeconomic cleavages among voters of different parties, less sharp in the seventies than in the past, persisted even with a shift in their occupational profile. Voting is based on a mixture of immediate considerations and fairly fixed socioeconomic characteristics. No political party can do without the young people who form the future political cadres of the nation. The SPD, as the party most open to societal reforms, had won substantial support from young voters in the 1972 election, but in 1976 their enthusiasm for the party had waned, even though more of them voted for it—many on a “lesser evil” basis—than for other parties. The SPD of the 1970s, considering itself to be a people’s, or catch-all, party, pursued the same policy.
