Volume 50 (2019), Edition 1

The current debate on an amendment to the electoral law for the German Bundestag also includes a possible reduction of the number of districts. On behalf of the Federal Election Commissioner, the authors computed possible apportionment of districts...

Modern election research starts with the study “The People’s Choice” by Paul F. Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet (1944). Almost 75 years after the publication of this canonical work, a study was carried out on the occasion of the...

The 2017 election brought significant changes to the membership of the German Bundestag. The parliament became much larger (709 seats) and the entry of 291 new deputies marked a new turnover record. Also, for the first time since unification, the...

Just one year after its foundation in 2013, the far right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) succeeded in being represented in every German state parliament as well as in the European Parliament. In 2017, 94 AfD representatives were elected into...

Apart from gender and age, no other socio-structural characteristics of party members are reliably captured in the membership registers of the German parties. A differentiated analysis of the social anchoring of the German party system can therefore...

In Germany political parties are bound by the democratic principles as stated in Art. 21 I 3 GG. Democratic principles are minimum requirements for the design of the internal party decision-making process. These minima include, among other things, a...

Based on the seven criteria proposed by Giovanni Sartori, this article examines whether the German party system can be assigned to the type of polarized pluralism after the 2017 general election. The results show, first, that the AfD’s electorate...

Up to this day, German Christian Democrats have ruled out any cooperation with the Left Party, citing its alleged radicalism and extremism. Yet in recent months, leading members of the CDU have challenged this strategy, suggesting “pragmatism”...

100 years ago, women in Germany received the right to vote and, hence, formally equal political citizenship with men. Looking at the historical and international dimension of the women’s suffrage movement shows that its fight was very committed as...