ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

The peaceful revolution of 1989 began in Saxony . 30 years later, the public eagerly awaited the results of Saxony’s seventh state elections . The AfD was expected to gain a high share of votes after the party there had already been the strongest...

After a campaign, which was both polarized and poor in content, the state election failed to produce a clear majority in the Landtag . The winners of the election were The Left and the AfD, while the parties of the right and left center suffered...

The article briefly presents the history of the municipal assemblies in Germany and, among other things, deals with the change in the Lower Saxony municipal code 1962/63 . At present, there are still municipal assemblies in Schleswig-Holstein . To...

Several German “Länder” are currently testing participatory methods to obtain opinions and ideas of citizens on legal proposals . They aim at achieving outputs that are widely accepted by the public, and thus considered to be better . These...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

After the 2019 European election, national political actors and party officials in both the European Parliament as well as in the Council once again clashed over the selection of the Commission’s President, a controversy that also received...

While the perception processes and effects of political TV duels at the (sub-)national level have been examined in great detail, studies with a similar scope of analytical profoundness and detail for TV duels at the European level are largely...