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The Dynamics of Voting: A Long-term Study of Change and Stability in the German Electoral Process

Subject Area Political Science
Empirical Social Research
Term from 2009 to 2024
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 90948644
 
Final Report Year 2025

Final Report Abstract

Over the past half century, the behavior of German voters has changed profoundly. After a long period of stability, elections have dramatically altered their character—at first rather gradually, but during the past two decades at accelerated speed. Voters’ decision-making has become much more volatile. The proportions of late deciders, party switchers and ticketsplitters have increased enormously. The fragmentation of the party system intensified sharply. A particularly conspicuous outcome of this period of turbulent electoral politics was the termination of Germany’s exceptionality as one of the few European countries without a strong right-wing populist party. Together, these developments rendered election results less predictable, and government formation more precarious. The 2005 federal election marked a critical turning point in this development towards increasing electoral fluidity. Since then, electoral choice has become a more difficult act for voters, not least due to the increasing complexity of political supply structures and the information environment. Against this background, the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) was launched in 2009 to study German voters’ rapidly changing electoral behavior. The project had two core objectives: (a) research on electoral behavior as a core element of democratic government and legitimization in liberal democracy, in particular on electoral change in longitudinal and comparative perspective; (b) generating a social-science infrastructure by building—in close collaboration with GESIS—an openly and easily accessible database for electoral researchers and other social scientists, in Germany and worldwide. Both goals presupposed a major effort in data collection. Accordingly, under a complex, integrated research design more than 100 complementary and interlocking datasets were generated at and in between the 2009, 2013, and 2017 federal elections. The core of the design consisted in numerous surveys of different kinds that together allowed to examine voters’ beliefs, attitudes and behavior in unprecedented detail, in static cross-sectional, but also short-term and long-term dynamic as well as contextually embedded perspective. They encompassed extensive cross-section face-to-face surveys, combining pre-and post-election waves, long-term and short-term panel surveys conducted face-to-face, by paper and pencil and online, rolling cross-section campaign surveys conducted per telephone, and a series of cross-sectional online surveys fielded continuously every three months from the 2009 up until the 2017 federal election. Additional instruments included surveys of the candidates running for parliamentary mandates, content analyses of political news coverage on TV and in the press, and experimental data on the chancellor candidates’ TV debates held at each of the three elections. Several of the components of the GLES were also integrated into the worldwide infrastructure for cross-nationally comparative research on the politics of elections. Six books were the core publications of the GLES. Shortly after each of the three federal elections covered by the project a comprehensive, primarily descriptive study of the respective election was published, aiming at a German-speaking audience not only consisting of electoral researchers, but also other political scientists as well as policy-makers, journalists, and a wider public of politically interested citizens. Moreover, drawing advantage from the continuously expanding database, whose scientific utility for addressing new research questions on electoral behavior grew from election to election (in particular with regard to the dynamic and contextual character of the observed processes), a series of three analytical books was published with a renowned international publisher, aiming at the international scholarly community of electoral researchers. These volumes offer a wide variety of analyses on the research agenda at the heart of the project which can be condensed into three generic research questions. (1) How did the turbulences that increasingly characterize German electoral politics come about? (2) How did they in turn condition voters’ decision-making? (3) How were electoral attitudes and choices affected by situational factors that pertained to the specifics of particular elections?

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