Immigrant German Election Study II: A Local Panel Study of Immigrant-Origin Voters during the Electoral Campaign of the 2021 Bundestag Election

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Achim Goerres, since 1/2022; Professorin Dr. Sabrina Jasmin Mayer
• Subject Area: Political Science
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 451082044

Never before have elections in Germany seen so many immigrant-origin voters as in the federal election 2017 where about 10 percent of voters (6.3 million) were of immigrant origin, i.e. they themselves or at least one of their parents had migrated to Germany. Furthermore, we saw that this heterogeneous group was increasingly important to electoral campaigners, with the group of Russian-Germans being persistently addressed by the Alternative for Germany, and the Allianz Deutscher Demokraten, an ethnic niche party, heavily targeting Turkish immigrants. However, even though their importance is increasing steadily, there is still not much known about immigrant-origin voters, and campaign effects have so far never been analysed for this group. In the first Immigrant German Election Study (IMGES-I, October 2016 to September 2020), we surveyed two nationally representative samples of these voter groups to describe and explain their voting behaviour. IMGES-I was focused on representative cross-sectional data collection. IMGES-II, the new proposed project, takes the data collection further and includes for the first time a dynamic perspective by repeatedly surveying individuals from one local context during one electoral campaign as part of the 2021 Bundestag election. With this follow-up proposal, we intend to answer the research questions of how immigrant-origin voters react to the election campaigns with their electoral behaviour (turnout and vote choice) and campaign behaviour (talking about the campaign, trying to convince others, volunteering, etc.), and how they respond to group-specific actions by parties, candidates, and political organisations as well as to media content. Answering these questions will allow us to understand how election campaigns affect immigrant-origin voters compared with native voters.The research team will conduct a panel study in the city of Duisburg with random samples of (1) Germans with a post-Soviet background, (2) Germans with a Turkish background and (3) Germans with no migration background (as a comparison group), during the campaign for the German federal election of 2021. Respondents will be surveyed in four major waves over a 7-month period. The research team will collect additional local- and national-level contextual data and will merge these data with the survey data. Finally, qualitative interviews with a theoretically drawn sub-sample of immigrant-origin voters will allow us to explore possible causal mechanisms of voter behaviour elicited by the election campaigns in greater depth.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Ehemalige Antragsteller: Professor Dr. Torben Lütjen, from 11/2021 until 1/2022; Professor Dr. Dennis C. Spies, until 11/2021 (†)