ZParl Zeitschrift für Parlamentsfragen

The analysis of party-voter congruence and divergence in Germany’s 2025 federal election draws on around 330,000 users of the “Wahl-Kompass” voting advice application, who donated the data. Five salient campaign issues are analyzed: the debt...

This article analyzes party positions and political polarization in the German party system during the 2025 federal election using the online voting advice applications “Wahl-O-Mat” and “WahlSwiper”. The findings show a strong programmatic...

The coalition negotiations following the Austrian National Council elections in 2024 developed into the longest government formation in the Second Republic and led to an oversized three-party coalition of the ÖVP, SPÖ and NEOS for the first time...

Traditional seat apportionment methods focus on proportionality in order to ensure equal suffrage. They may violate a property called majority preservation, though, as we expose on a number of recent elections in Germany. As such, a coalition of...

The federal election on February 23, 2025, was marked by high polarization, which focused mainly on the issue of migration, leading to a record turnout of 82.5 percent. The Union (CDU/CSU) achieved 28.5 percent, but fell short of expectations, while...

The outcome of the Hamburg state election held on March 2, 2025, was principally shaped by city-specific issues, despite the extraordinary context of an early federal election just one week prior, which was triggered by the collapse of the federal...

The Austrian National Council election on September 29, 2024 marks the endpoint of the longest legislative period since the extension of the term of office in 2007. There have been five elections since then, and it was only the second time that it...

After the break-up of the traffic light coalition in November 2025, the question of confidence was used to bring about early general elections. Mathematically and politically, the results allowed only for a coalition between the CDU/CSU and the SPD....

In the last two weeks of the 2025 federal election campaign, the chancellor candidates from the CDU/CSU, SPD, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen, and AfD parties met in three televised debates in various constellations, continuing a tradition of televised...

The Schleswig-Holstein local election system features four problematic aspects, which are associated with paradoxical effects that are not appropriate to the local context. These include the fact that individual candidates sometimes do not receive a...

Since the 1970s, the party systems of European democracies have undergone fundamental changes. In all countries, the centrist parties that had shaped political life for decades lost support among the electorate. The first phase of change was...

The end of the so-called “traffic light coalition” in November 2024 demonstrated once again that party coalitions in Germany sometimes end prematurely – that is, before the regular end of the legislative period. Against this background, this...

Amid a constitutional crisis caused by the sitting President’s self-coup attempt—abuse of martial law power and mobilization of military troops—in December 2024, the Korean parliament, the National Assembly, played a key role in swiftly...

The Speaker of the House of Representatives plays a key role in the U.S. political system; their decisions and leadership styles have far-reaching impacts on national politics. However, conflicts within the Republican Party have damaged this office...

With Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 election, his brand of nationalist populism has firmly established itself as the ideological and organizational guiding force of the Republican Party. Internal critics have been sidelined, Congress is loyal,...

The 2024 U.S. presidential election marked a historic turning point: Donald Trump became the first president since Grover Cleveland to return to the White House after an electoral defeat. Winning 312 to 226 electoral votes and 49.8 percent of the...

The second Trump Administration is proving tumultuous for the German-American relationship. Ever-changing U.S. policies on trade, tariffs, taxes, defense, as well as on conflicts like Russia-Ukraine have already weakened the Transatlantic...

The 2024 U.S. elections did not only produce with Donald Trump a new (and also old) president, at the same time the entire House of Representatives as well as a third of the Senate were re-elected. The Republicans managed to keep their thin majority...

Together with the banning of political parties and the destruction of parliamentarism, National Socialism transformed the referendum, ostensibly to strengthen the people, into an instrument of approval democracy without the opportunity for...