German Election Research Articles

EVOLUTION AND PROSPECTS OF THE «ALTERNATIVE FOR GERMANY»

In recent years, the populist Alternative for Germany (AfG) party, which systematically opposes the ruling mainstream parties, has become active on the German political scene. In contrast to the approach of the mainstream parties, the AfG’s views on governance and engagement with the European Union now pose a threat to the coalition of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Free Democratic Party (FDP) and the Alliance 90 / The Greens because of the increasing popularity of right-wing populists among the German electorate. In autumn 2025, Germany will hold federal elections to the Bundestag, which will determine the political course of the country for the next 5 years. The purpose of this article is to assess the prospects of the Alternative for Germany party in the Bundestag elections in 2025.A significant part of the article is devoted to reviewing the ideological evolution of the party, which has gone from a minor moderate party to the leading opposition force in the country. This is essential in order to understand the implications of the current rise in social tensions and scandals around Alternative and how this may affect its future political sustainability. Authors provide a forecast of the party’s chances of success in the parliamentary elections and assess the risks that the AfG may face during the electoral struggle. The conclusion is made that the chances of the Alternative for Germany party to enter the government in 2025 will depend on its capacity to timely eliminate the accumulated internal contradictions, such as the excessive radicalisation of the party and the lack of a unified ideological component among its leaders.

Are charitable donations a luxury good of the rich? Evidence from a survey and actual behavior in a superdiverse metropolis

AbstractObjectivePrevious studies on charitable giving have emphasized the importance of socioeconomic status in explaining why individuals choose to donate or not to donate money. Other explanations, such as social capital or local contexts, have also been investigated, but these perspectives are rarely combined and tested against an actual behavioral outcome measure. We seek to compare the statistical importance of these explanations for individual‐level donation decisions.MethodsOur study investigates survey respondents’ choices to repeatedly donate their earned incentive after a completed interview in the three waves of the Immigrant German Election Study II from 2021. In each wave, respondents were offered an incentive worth 10 euros, which they could either keep as a gift card or donate to the local food bank. This decision is a measurement of real rather than self‐reported donation behavior. We combine individual‐level variables and neighborhood‐level variables that capture the heterogeneity of our sample to systematically compare explanations for this donation decision.ResultsWe find that the respondents’ self‐assessed economic situation and sociopolitical preferences in favor of more social spending by the state, rather than the respondents’ objective socioeconomic status, have strong positive effects on the total amount donated throughout the survey.ConclusionNot the rich per se, but those who think they are doing well economically, and who are on the redistributive left, give more to others. These findings remain robust after controlling for the strong heterogeneity of our sample.

Surveying immigrant-origin voters in a post-migrant society: The first Immigrant German Election Study, 2017

This paper introduces the Immigrant German Election Study (IMGES) as the first survey that explicitly targeted immigrant-origin voters in Germany. IMGES fills the gap of insufficient data in the field of immigrant-origin voters with a combination of proven and novel survey measures of the electoral behavior of people with a background from either Türkiye or from the former Soviet Union or its successor states. The study was carried out in a post-election, cross-sectional survey in 2017. Its compatibility with the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), the Ethnic Minority British Election Study (EMBES), and the Dutch Ethnic Minority Election Study (DEMES) allows for in-depth comparative analyses between immigrant-origin voters and natives across different countries. In addition to standard measures of electoral behavior, the data include measures of immigrant-specific factors relevant to voting behavior. Moreover, the dataset is not limited to voting behavior in Germany, it also includes transnational voting behavior in the respective countries of origin.

Electoral Messiah or Party Label? Quantifying and Investigating Leader-Party Relationships in German Federal Elections 1998–2021

While the personalization of politics thesis has received support when exploring the supply side of politics and the media's coverage of elections and campaigns, the unmediated impact of leaders on vote choice (demand-side behavioral personalization) is debated. Most scholars agree that leaders can and do influence the vote, but the extent, circumstances, and pathways for this to occur, notably distinct from voter assessments of the party, remains contested. Using data from the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES), we explore demand-side behavioral personalization in German Federal elections between 1998–2021, with a particular focus on the 2021 contest, where leadership was arguably an especially salient feature of the campaign. We offer a quantification of the phenomenon – first in the form of a vote-leader/party favorite alignment index and second by separating the impact of leader and party popularity on the vote in the 2021 contest, including provision for temporal and reciprocal dynamics. In doing so, we comprehensively examine leader-inclined voting while testing whether the 2021 contest represented a “Crossroads” contest on this dimension. Our results show leaders directly influenced vote choice in 2021, support for leader-inclined voting. Nevertheless, we find little evidence that 2021 marked a “Crossroads,” with few voters aligning their vote solely with their favorite leader, a pattern detected in all German elections between 1998 and 2021. Conspicuously, substantially more voters report aligning their vote with their favorite party. Further, our analysis illustrates that the association between leader popularity and the vote mostly trails the impact of party popularity’s connection with the vote. These results align more with the leaders minimalist school of demand-side behavioral personalization.

Gamson–Shapley Laws: a formal approach to parliamentary coalition formation

We consider a set of empirical assumptions formulated by Gamson (1961), namely, Gamson’s Laws, which remain at the heart of government formation forecast in parliamentary systems. While the critical resource postulated in Gamson’s approach is the proportion of votes received by each party, other versions of Gamson’s Laws can be defined by a different choice of critical resource. We model coalition formation as a cooperative game, and provide axiomatic foundations for a version of Gamson’s Laws in which the critical resource is identified with strategic influence, as measured by the Shapley value. We compare the empirical accuracy of the resulting Gamson–Shapley theory against the original Gamson’s Laws in a panel of 33 parliamentary elections, and find that it leads to significantly more accurate predictions of both coalition structure and power distribution. Finally, we propose an extension of the Gamson–Shapley approach which also incorporates information about policy distance among coalition partners. In particular, we discuss the advantages of the extended approach in the context of the German elections in 1987 and 2017.

Generational change in party support in Germany: The decline of the Volksparteien, the rise of the Greens, and the transformation of the education divide

Motivated by the eroding support for the old “Volksparteien” CDU/CSU and SPD, especially among younger voters, this study conducts an age-period-cohort analysis of vote choices in all 20 German federal elections, from 1949 to 2021. I study both generational differences in levels of party support and the changing effect of education on voting. The results, first, point to the importance of generational replacement in understanding party's shifting fortunes, with the CDU/CSU and the SPD being weaker in more recent cohorts and the Greens stronger. Second, while high education divides voters of the old right (CDU/CSU and especially FDP) and left (SPD) in earlier cohorts, it divides voters of the new-left Greens and the radical-right AfD in more recent cohorts. This study enhances our understanding of the changing patterns of party support in the German electorate and, as a broader lesson, shows how electoral realignment is driven by generational replacement.

Politicization of redistributive policies and political behavior of the poor in German elections

The socio-economic gradient in political participation is a growing concern in Germany and many other democracies. We investigate whether campaigns that politicize socio-economic conflicts can mobilize the poor to become more politically active. Using a mixed-methods design that draws on party manifestos, election surveys, and focus group discussions, we show that the 2021 election followed a trend of re-positioning of the SPD, shifting their focus again towards redistributive issues. However, these changes were only partly perceived by citizens on the micro level. While greater politicization of socio-economic issues was followed by greater political involvement of the poor in recent elections, the SPD could not capitalize much on that development. Our qualitative findings indicate that the poor paid little attention to the SPD campaign discourse outside the minimum wage issue. Furthermore, it becomes obvious that the SPD faces a greater credibility problem among its former electorate.

Earnings information and public preferences for university tuition: Evidence from representative experiments

Higher education finance depends on the public’s preferences for charging tuition, which may be partly based on beliefs and awareness about the university earnings premium. To test whether public support for tuition depends on earnings information, we devise survey experiments in representative samples of the German electorate (N > 15,000). The electorate is divided, with a plurality opposing tuition. Providing information on the university earnings premium raises support for tuition by 7 percentage points, turning the plurality in favor. The opposition-reducing effect persists two weeks after treatment. While there is some evidence of information-based updating of biased beliefs, the effect seems to mainly work through increased salience which triggers reduced consideration of financial constraints when forming preferences for tuition. Information on fiscal costs and unequal access does not affect public preferences. We subject the baseline result to various experimental tests of replicability, robustness, heterogeneity, and consequentiality.

Comparing the mobilising effects of in-person canvassing to postal reminders – experimental evidence from a longitudinal election study

ABSTRACT For hard-to-survey populations such as ethnic minorities and immigrants, increasing survey response rates is a crucial element of the fieldwork as these populations often show a higher likelihood of not participating compared with the native population. However, no study has so far compared different strategies for mobilisation within this group. Using data from the Immigrant German Election Study II, this experiment systematically compares the effects of home visits and postal reminders for the mobilisation of immigrant-origin non-respondents (i.e. persons classified as being from Turkey or from the former Soviet Union and its successor states) from a randomly drawn sample regarding the likelihood of participation in the first wave, signing up for a multi-wave panel, and taking part in all three panel waves. Multivariate analyses show that those in the treated home-visit group were more likely to take part in all stages of the survey design. Even though costs are higher than conventional postal reminders, home visits might be a useful strategy for cases in which increasing the response rate is an important goal, given a fixed, small number of potential respondents.

Politicians over issues? Visual personalization in three Instagram election campaigns

ABSTRACT The increased use of social media has triggered a visual shift in digital political communication. One central strategy is visual (self-) personalization and many studies have analyzed why and to what extent political communication is focused on individuals. Yet, most research has concentrated on personalization, leaving aside the question of whether it comes at the expense of policy issues or whether people are brought into focus as facilitators of such issues. We fill this research gap by analyzing how visual (self-) personalization on Instagram pages of parties and politicians during election campaigns has changed over time and whether it comes at the cost of addressing policy issues. We use data from three quantitative content analyses of Instagram posts published by parliamentary parties (n = 7) and top candidates (n = 18) in the ‘hot phases’ before three national German elections (N = 2313), covering all nationwide elections since Instagram has become a common campaign tool. It is shown that personal depictions are very common in Instagram campaigns of parties and candidates while addressing policy issues in posts varies between elections. Using a multilevel binomial regression model, we show that addressing policy issues is negatively related to personalization but further analysis shows that it is not a zero-sum game at the cost of addressing policy issues. Our results provide insights into how the presentation of politics might change when image- and video-based platforms continue to gain importance in political communication.

Responsivität im polarisierten Pluralismus – Zur Entwicklung der Einstellungskongruenz zwischen Politikern und Wählern auf umstrittenen Politikfeldern

Responsiveness of politicians to the citizens is one of the key characteristics of a representa- tive democracy . It can be measured by whether and to what extent the preferences of politi- cians and the population coincide . Particularly in times of accelerating social change, polit- ical decision-makers face the challenge of confronting new problems and solving them in a way that is perceived as fair and appropriate by the public . Since two decades new issues emerge on the political agenda in addition to more traditional policy-issues . How to deal with two problems, increasing transnational migration and climate change, is particularly contentious . Based on opinion surveys for the past four federal elections, this article exam- ines the structure of, and changes in, the congruence of attitudes among candidates for the Bundestag, its Members and the German electorate . While the two groups of politicians and the population differ from each other in their positioning on the left-right continuum and their basic socioeconomic ideas, but are not opposed to each other in principle, a com- pletely different constellation appears in the policies of climate protection and migration . Politicians and the population are largely united in their support for a stronger commit- ment to fight the climate change; in migration policy, however, the majority of the popula- tion favors a restrictive course, while the majority of politicians prefer a liberal immigration policy .

Plurality Rule, Majority Principle and Indeterminacy in German Elections

Plurality Rule, Majority Principle and Indeterminacy in German Elections

Illiberal trends in the European Union: Examining the impact of ethnic minority mobilization on German elections

Illiberal trends in the European Union: Examining the impact of ethnic minority mobilization on German elections

Narratives on migration and political polarization: How the emphasis in narratives can drive us apart

Nowadays, immigration is a polarizing topic in politics. In this paper, we investigate how much this political polarization is driven by the depiction narratives made of immigrants vis-a-vis the natives. Furthermore, we look at whether polarization is rooted in private preferences over narratives or in how they are endorsed in public settings and social media. Our empirical strategy consists of a survey experiment in the 2021 German elections and a field experiment on Twitter in which we manipulate the “pinned tweets” of experimental users. To build our narratives, we manipulate either the policy position — hostile toward or accepting migration — or an emphasis on the out-group, on the in-group, or on economic reciprocity. We find that political polarization is driven both by the policy position and emphasis in narratives. On Twitter, the out-group emphasis drives supporters of different parties apart, and the corresponding hostile narrative becomes the only one going viral. In the survey, right-wing participants prefer the reciprocity emphasis more, but we still find evidence of more polarization when allowing the participants to go public.

The Enduring Effect of Immigration Attitudes on Vote Choice

Abstract Immigration attitudes have long been critical in predicting electoral behavior in Western Europe. Whether such attitudes will continue to motivate political behavior in the current pandemic environment is yet to be seen. This article addresses this topic by exploring immigration's prevalence and impact on Germany's 2021 Bundestag election. Combining evidence across multiple German election surveys, I find that immigration remains consequential in shaping political behavior throughout the country. In spite of immigration's reduced political salience, voters continued to view immigration as one of the most important political problems facing Germany. Moreover, immigration-minded voters were significantly more likely to support the Alternative for Germany on the far right and punish the Greens on the left. The article concludes that reducing immigration's salience will not necessarily change its influence over modern German elections.

Political Ignorance and the Internet

Abstract We examine the link between Internet usage and political ignorance. To do so, we construct a novel index measuring individuals’ indifference with respect to political issues, which determines the degree of individual political ignorance. Our descriptive econometric analysis is based on a rich dataset consisting of six surveys of individuals covering the time period 2001–2014 and being representative for the German electorate. The empirical results show that in earlier years of Internet diffusion, there is a negative link between using the Internet and political ignorance. This link changes sign in later years of Internet diffusion. We discuss potential explanations of this observed change in the link such as information overload and the increase in heterogeneity of Internet users.

After Merkel – The 2021 German Election and its Implications for European Union Politics

After Merkel – The 2021 German Election and its Implications for European Union Politics

The 2021 federal German election: A gender and intersectional analysis

On 26 September 2021, Germans elected the 20th Bundestag. This election was special in many ways. The article analyses the electoral campaign, voting behaviour, turnout, and the formation of a new coalition government by using a gender and intersectional lens. Against the conceptual background of descriptive, substantive, and symbolic representation, we outline the implications of the election for gender and intersectional politics in the new German Bundestag and the government. In descriptive and symbolic terms, we find higher numbers of women (and of minorities) in the Bundestag and its leadership as well as in government; in substantive terms, we observe the presence of ‘critical actors’ and the commitment to progressive politics in the new ‘Ampel’ coalition. Hence, we see at least a chance for change in several key policy areas and social progress in the next 4 years.

From the Eternal Grand Coalition to the Traffic Light Alliance

The first German election without Angela Merkel as a candidate in over one and a half decades would turn out to be one of the most unpredictable in the history of the Federal Republic. For most of the election year, a conservative Green alliance appeared the most likely outcome, potentially even with a Green chancellor at its head. However, the final months of campaigning showcased the volatility of the increasingly fragmented party system and the relevance that candidate selection and external events can have on political majorities. Having been stuck in third place for about three years, the spd’s well-organized campaign managed to complete a remarkable victory, allowing the Social Democrats to come in first for just the third time in close to half a century. Transcending traditional ideological divides, Olaf Scholz’s subsequent three-party “traffic light” alliance serves to perfectly reflect the changes that Germany’s party system has undergone since reunification.

Voter Polarisation in Germany: Unpolarised Western but Polarised Eastern Germany?

ABSTRACT Recently, the concept of polarisation has experienced a considerable upturn and made its way into the public debate. As far as the German case goes, it has been argued that the electorate is becoming increasingly polarised and that a rift is running through society. The tendency is said to be particularly pronounced in the eastern part of the country, as can be deduced from the electoral successes of the Left Party and the AfD. This paper empirically tests this argument on the basis of ALLBUS data in the period since reunification. Using in particular the left-right self-placement and in addition three policy items connected with the GAL-TAN dimension as measures for ideological preferences, it appears that no conclusive evidence for this hypothesis can be found – neither in Eastern nor Western Germany. Yet, the findings are different with regard to the policy issue of immigration. Here, a clear antagonism between supporters and opponents of immigration can be identified. Based on the overall findings, it would, however, be a misconception to conclude that the German electorate is polarised. On the contrary, looking at the different developments in Western and Eastern Germany, in recent years a tendency toward a belated ideological unification has become apparent.