Municipal elections in the German multi-level system

• Applicant: Dr. Kerstin Völkl
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 442452026

Election research is the most developed field of empirical political science in Germany. While the determinants of electoral behaviour have been comprehensively investigated at the national level, there is a particular lack of studies at the local level. In order to close this research gap, the project focuses on the most important forms of behaviour of citizens in elections to the local council: voter turnout and electoral decision-making. The proposal has the following objectives:1. development of a theory of local electoral behaviour, 2. developing a questionnaire for a telephone survey which is suitable to examine the local electoral behaviour,3. empirical examination of the extent to which local electoral behaviour tends to be explained by the same factors as at the national level (convergence thesis) or to what extent the factors known at the national level have a different weight and genuinely local explanatory factors exist (difference thesis),4. stability test of the theory developed for municipal electoral behaviour by controlling specific municipal context factors (municipality size, local electoral and party system) in three federal states.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants