  The paper explores the notion of a reconfiguration of political space in the
context of the rise of populism and its effects on the political system. We
focus on Germany and the appearance of the new right wing party "Alternative
for Germany" (AfD). Many scholars of politics discuss the rise of the new
populism in Western Europe and the US with respect to a new political cleavage
related to globalization, which is assumed to mainly affect the cultural
dimension of the political space. As such, it might replace the older economic
cleavage based on class divisions in defining the dominant dimension of
political conflict. An explanation along these lines suggests a reconfiguration
of the political space in the sense that (1) the main cleavage within the
political space changes its direction from the economic axis towards the
cultural axis, but (2) also the semantics of the cultural axis itself is
changing towards globalization related topics. Using the electoral manifestos
from the Manifesto project database, we empirically address this
reconfiguration of the political space by comparing political spaces for
Germany built using topic modeling with the spaces based on the content
analysis of the Manifesto project and the corresponding categories of political
goals. We find that both spaces have a similar structure and that the AfD
appears on a new dimension. In order to characterize this new dimension we
employ a novel technique, inter-issue consistency networks (IICN) that allow to
analyze the evolution of the correlations between the political positions on
different issues over several elections. We find that the new dimension
introduced by the AfD can be related to the split off of a new "cultural right"
issue bundle from the previously existing center-right bundle.
