Here's a comparison case, the general public has had far greater access to statistics and other data relevant to elections since the advent of the internet, has there been any corresponding change in behaviour?*

I think there are a lot of systematic changes that happened in the last 20 years politics.

Newspaper have less money that they can spend on investigative reporters. The cold war ended. 9/11 happened. I think there more political distrust of the main parties.

In Germany there are a bunch of smaller parties such as the pirate party who take a bigger share of the vote than they did 20 years ago. A new party with an age of less than a year got got 4.9% of the vote at the last election (the need 5% to enter parliament). There seems to be room for a new party to arise. The last real new party that did arise in Germany was the Green party that was born out of the environmentalist movement decades ago.