ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

The Federal German Electoral Law allots 299 constituency and 299 party list parliamentary seats or more . The personalized proportional representation (PR) system prescribes party list votes as the dominant principle of seat distribution . In this...

The reform of the electoral law in 2013 introduced adjustment seats that compensate for surplus mandates, resulting in the Bundestag increasing in size . The new electoral law passed by the Grand Coalition in October 2020 will not provide an...

The Grand Coalition in Germany struggled with achieving a substantial reform of the electoral law . The measures it has introduced will presumably fail to prevent an additional increase in the number of Bundestag members after the next election . It...

In May of 1968 the CDU parliamentary party of Schleswig-Holstein’s parliament (Landtag) established a working group to analyze the “youth protests” taking place throughout Germany . In that summer the Landtag constituted a special committee to...

Thuringia’s electoral law stipulates a parity rule for its next state parliament election . Each political party’s electoral list should alternately be filled by female and male candidates . The Constitutional Court of Thuringia revoked the law...

Have the school strikes for the climate (Fridays for Future (FFF) movement) affected political agenda setting in Germany? And does a MP’s party affiliation matter for how often and in what ways he or she mentions the FFF movement? These questions...

Thinking about the role of the state during the corona pandemic may seem like “carrying coals to Newcastle” . After all, times of crisis are considered to be times of the executive . What is needed more than ever, therefore, seems to be a strong...

The AfD was successful in each of the six elections held in 2019/20 (European Parliament, Bremen, Hamburg, Brandenburg, Saxony, and Thuringia) . The right-wing party either renewed or in most cases managed to enlarge its parliamentary representation...

What were the central characteristics of those members of parliament who rebuilt parliamentarism in Eastern Germany after reunification? A detailed picture emerges from surveys conducted in 1991/92 and in 1994 . All East German MPs were included in...

The starting position before the elections to the Hamburg parliament was favorable for the governing red-green coalition . The citizens of Hamburg expected an exciting neck-and-neck race between SPD Mayor Peter Tschentscher and his Green challenger...

The article outlines the recent development of the petitioning system in Germany and discusses the most important private and state platforms for public, digitally signable petitions . Connecting private platforms with the parliamentary petitioning...

The term multi-level parliamentarism has been used to mark the position of German Land parliaments . To check the validity of this term, the relations between parliaments in regard to their parliamentary structure components, namely leadership,...

False diagnostics are dangerous if they lead to false therapies . This is also true for election analyses . Diagnostic trends such as “Polarization” and “a new Cleavage” currently dominate the field . Despite being supposed to provide...

In order to analyze whether the entry of the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) into parliaments has changed parliamentary debate culture a content analysis of budget debates for the period 2012-2017 is conducted, where the...

The elections in three East German Länder in 2019 did not only result in significant changes in the proportional vote share but also in severe shifts in constituency results between directly elected deputies . Against this backdrop this article...

The state election in Bremen in 2019 was marked by a head-to-head race between SPD and CDU and ended up with a considerably increased turnout and a historical result . The Christian Democrats managed to beat the Social Democrats for the first time...

Although the right to form and exercise parliamentary opposition has always been recognized as an essential part of the free democratic basic order, there is widespread disagreement within jurisprudence about the specific status of oppositional...

The article provides detailed insights into the pre-parliamentary stage of the legislative process for the county-level territorial restructuring in Brandenburg . In the further development of specific aspects of the draft bill, the state government...

After a slow beginning, Brandenburg’s election campaign became dominated by the SPD’s and AfD’s struggle to come in first . This contributed considerably to an increase in turnout to 61 .3 percent . Although the SPD won the election with 26 .2...