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This paper demonstrates a systematic geographic bias in the German mixed-member electoral system. This bias concerns the composition of the individual party groups, and, by extension, the composition of the parliament: The Bundestag is much more urban than it would be under equal geographic representation. The bias is caused by the distribution of list seats across districts: since parties have incentives to give the best list positions to candidates from their strongest districts, regions where the vote is more fragmented systematically get more representatives. Since the vote is more fragmented in urban districts, these districts have more MPs than rural districts. The paper empirically analyses Bundestag elections between 1994 and 2017 and demonstrates that geographic disproportionality has increased strongly with the growing fragmentation of the German party system. This affects substantive representation in terms of leadership positions and voting behaviour in the Bundestag. Unequal representation in the German political system therefore also has a geographic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 not only put the public health system under considerable pressure, but it also posed a huge challenge for established routines of intergovernmental coordination in Germany. As the Länder are responsible for implementing infection prevention measures, the most senior intergovernmental council, the minister presidents' conference (MPK), became the central body for pandemic crisis management. In light of high uncertainty, time pressure and public attention, drastic actions were taken to contain the dissemination of the corona virus. Against this background, our paper investigates how party politics impacted on horizontal coordination in times of crisis. The analysis shows that indeed territorial party politics interferes with routines of intergovernmental coordination. While congruence between the federal and Länder governments promotes homogenous implementation of joint MPK resolutions, increasing coalition size and intense party competition make deviations more likely. Finally, partisan ideology plays a key role as parties pursue clearly distinct pandemic management strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, interest has grown in using election manifestos to measure populism. This, however, is not without its controversies, with critics arguing that party manifestos is an unlikely case for observing populist language. This paper discusses conceptual challenges associated with measuring populism in text-based data, specifically manifestos. Based on previous research, I argue that not all parts of manifestos are equally likely to contain populist language and that variation might be based on the issue being discussed. To test this point, I present a novel dataset containing 32 hand-coded election manifestos of German populist parties AfD and Die Linke. By utilising this data, I analyse the variation in populist sentiment within these manifestos and demonstrate that issues vary in their degree of populism employed and that this is partially related to what issues are salient to populist parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the German government embraced a major shift towards a grants-based EU recovery fund relying on common European debt. How can we explain this impetus, especially in view of the reticent German fiscal stance in previous years and in the early stages of the pandemic? To elucidate this question, this paper provides a qualitative inquiry into German preference formation during the spring of 2020. Theoretically, it reconciles liberal intergovernmentalist and discursive accounts of preference formation in the context of EU politics stressing the intertwined nature and simultaneousness of preference formation in the national and European arenas. We hypothesise that, along with material self-interests, the construction and framing of the pandemic as a certain type of crisis was key. Examining the stances taken by the federal government, commercial groups and key EU actors such as France and the European Commission, our findings point to a rapid preference realignment in German political and economic circles. Overall, the analysis suggests that especially in times of crisis, assumed national preferences are subject to reconfiguration thus allowing for contingent political responses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital media plays a vital role for political parties' communication. Research so far has focused mainly on the use of social media for election campaigns, while little is known about party officials' use of social media for intra-party communication. Besides elections, key events for political parties are conferences, in which delegates play a central role in transmitting the party branches' perspectives to the party and vice versa. Therefore, this paper addresses a) the role played by social media regarding the communication of party delegates with their party branch, and b) the factors determining delegates' social media usage. To answer these questions, we drew on survey data collected during the 2018 party conference of the German Green Party. Based on multivariate analysis, our results indicate that party delegates' social media usage is rather low and driven by (younger) age and normative and strategic considerations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Members with a migrant background (MMB) are underrepresented in political parties. So far, most research on this issue only scrutinises the representation of elite-level politicians with migrant backgrounds. To enhance this literature, I survey approaches toward the party-political integration of MMB at the rank-and-file level. The paper is centred around the following question; are local party leaders committed to the party-political integration of MMB or are they biased against them? In two original studies in Germany, including a field experiment and a conjoint experiment, I show that local party leaders are equally willing to engage in public discourse about the recruitment of MMB and general member recruitment and that many of them declare a commitment toward increasing the share of MMB. However, this declared commitment is in large part driven by social-desirability bias: when asked to declare preferences based on multiple attributes of potential members, the commitment to increase the share of MMB disappears for most parties. Much more than their migration background, the age and gender of potential members dictate preferences: young people and women are most often mentioned as preferred new members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]