ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

For the election on September 24, 2017, Angela Merkel’s second Grand Coalition had a remarkable record to present to German voters: stable economic growth, secure jobs and unemployment at a rare low . However, both coalition partners were dealt a...

When only glancing at the 2013 German federal election it seems to be an exceptional case, as it reversed the long-term trend of the German party system towards an ever-increasing fragmentation by a specific combination of short-term factors . The...

The empirical analysis of socio-economic characteristics of the 2017 German federal election results reveals that the AfD electorate largely corresponds to a cross-section of Germany’s society . In the course of changing from a mainly...

Since the beginning of the Federal Republic, Free Voters have been a dominant actor in German local politics . Despite their importance on the local level, their membership structure, identity and organization have hardly been studied . Based on a...

Declining numbers of party members in Europe have led to the presumption that over time parties will disappear as membership organizations . This view is opposed by the normalization thesis, which predicts that membership parties will survive albeit...

The 2017 German federal election was followed by a series of coalition talks that, since World War II, were unprecedented . After the exploratory talks between CDU/CSU, FDP and Bündnis 90/Die Grünen had failed, CDU/CSU and SPD started to open...

The formation of the federal government in Germany after the Bundestag election in 2017 was more complicated and took longer than ever before . This was not only caused by the election results but also by the early determination of the SPD to take...