Volume 51 (2020), Edition 1

Party statutes stipulate their internal rules . Among other things they address how candidates are selected, who is allowed to nominate candidates, who is eligible to stand as a candidate and which voting procedures apply . For the 2017 Bundestag...

Intra-party selection procedures that precede the conference to nominate a party list are substantively understudied . Yet, they are of utmost importance to explain and evaluate what happens at the formal selection events . This study investigates...

The Ochsentour describes the slow, hard road to the top of political positions and is colloquially negatively associated . But despite this negative image, it remains unclear what actually constitutes this process of intra-party proving and how to...

Before an election takes place, the party members select their parliamentary candidates . Their nomination decisions depend on their vision of an ideal candidate . Based on the IParl survey of party members participating in the candidate selection...

The rise of the right-wing populist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) has changed the German party landscape and challenged the other Bundestag parties . So far, this has not been paid attention to when looking at how parties fulfill their...

Lately, the parliamentarian presence of women more and more has been a topic in public debates . These debates draw more on theoretical arguments instead of on empirical findings . How the gender gap between the German Bundestag’s composition and...

The early elections of December 2019 were held under special circumstances . The country was and still is divided politically and socially with regard to her future relationship with the EU . Brexit was one of the major election issues . Boris...

After Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his party PSOE were unable to pass the state budget for 2019 due to a continuing blockade in parliament, Sánchez called new elections for the end of April 2019 . This was just another chapter in a...

This article investigates if a party system change has taken place in Spain from June 1977 to January 2019 . The operationalization of Smith’s (1989) definition of party system change requires the distinction between “normal” and “unusual”...

The political parties represented in the Bundestag have about 300 .000 active members, from whom all elected officials, from local councils to the European Parliament, are recruited . Due to the ongoing membership decline in parties the pool of...

Parties link the society with the state . It is their task to recruit members, integrate and train them for taking over leadership positions at different levels . Since 1990 the parties in (unified) Germany lose members . Does this prevent them from...