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

• Applicants: Professorin Dr. Sigrid Roßteutscher; Professor Dr. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck; Professor Dr. Harald Schoen; Professor Dr. Bernhard Weßels; Professor Dr. Christof Wolf
• Subject Area: Political Science ; Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2009 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 90948644

This application aims at funding of the finalization and handover of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) for two years. The third funding period 2015-2017 covers the data collections but not the period for analyses and publication about the Federal Elections in Sept. 2017. In addition, GLES will become successfully institutionalized with a guaranteed and stable funding at GESIS starting with the Federal Elections 2021. The handover of the GLES to GESIS needs careful preparation and cooperation. The final period of the project 2018-2019 aims at three goals: scientific analyses and publications, consolidation of the data 2009-2017, and handover of the GLES to GESIS. The scientific goal of analyses and publications are at the core, funding is only requested for staff not for data collection. With the third Federal Election covered by the GLES and the respective data collection research aims at using the full range of data for producing two volumes: one for the German market and one for the international audience, and a number of journal articles. The guiding question, valid for the whole project aims to determine the conditions of the changing voter in a changing political environment. The GLES project took these phenomena as points of departure for a comprehensive longitudinal analysis of how voters cope with the increasing complexity of German electoral politics and of the repercussions of these developments for the dynamics of the party system and for the quality of representative democracy in Germany. Therefore, GLES treats single elections as cases in a longitudinal multi-level design. It combines surveys about voting behaviour with investigating key dimensions of the context within which votes are cast by means of analyses of media, candidates, and campaigns, and by covering both campaign periods and the time in-between elections. With regard to infrastructure, all data generated by this hitherto most comprehensive program of German electoral research are treated as a public good and made immediately accessible to all interested social scientists.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants