This study investigates how public concern that immigration increases crime shapes electoral politics. Existing research credits an educational realignment for a growing left–right split on immigration. The argument here is different: leftist voters can be more conservative on immigrant crime than leftist parties, and that voter–party mismatch can drive highly educated progressives (so-called cosmopolitans) toward right-wing parties.
David Aaron Newman Attewell challenge conventional accounts that treat education as an individual trait—skill, value formation, or selection—by asking how education works as a feature of social networks. Building on cleavage theory, the authors argue that educationally segregated ties can stabilize contemporary political cleavages even as traditional mass organizations wane.
A common narrative holds that status anxieties—fears that social groups are losing standing—drive right‑wing backlash against progressive politics. Magdalena Breyer, Tabea Palmtag, and Delia Zollinger test that claim by asking who ordinary people mention when they describe changing social hierarchies. Understanding which groups appear in people’s mental maps of status matters for how scholars interpret political grievances and for how campaigns and movements frame social change.
In March 2021 several national MPs from Germany's governing CDU/CSU were publicly accused in a public-procurement corruption scandal. Arndt Leininger and Lukas Rudolph ask whether voters punish an entire party for the misconduct of a few individual politicians — and whether that punishment travels across levels of government and organizational boundaries within the party.
Matthias Dilling and Félix Krawatzek investigate whether populist radical right (PRR) parties act as "memory entrepreneurs"—actively contesting and reshaping public historical narratives—and if so, how prominent and what tone those attacks take. The question matters because challenges to dominant historical interpretations can undermine shared civic foundations and reshape political debate.
This study asks whether monuments to victims of authoritarian regimes — specifically Stolpersteine in Germany — can promote greater tolerance. Using a pre-registered survey experiment that exposed respondents to pictures of Stolpersteine, the authors examine emotional reactions and several attitudinal and quasi‑behavioral tolerance measures. The paper’s central contribution is evidence about immediate emotional responses to this form of victim commemoration and how those responses relate to measured tolerance.
Politicians’ prior jobs shape how credible they appear on specific issues, and that credibility helps parties build support for policy agendas.
Citizens in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) submitted frequent housing-related petitions to the state. The central question is whether those petitions produced tangible improvements in livelihoods by influencing where new housing was built.
Are nonverbal reactions during parliamentary debate gendered? Do male and female members of parliament experience applause or jeering differently depending on the gendered nature of the speech?
This article asks whether a democratic middle power — Germany — uses high‑level visits to help democratic durability in other countries during periods of domestic instability. Using a novel dataset of German chancellor visits from 1991–2023, the authors assess whether Germany’s visits are more likely when host countries face internal turbulence and whether regime type and party politics shape that responsiveness.
How do different types of MPs in mixed-member proportional systems signal territorial ties in public communication? This study examines whether directly elected (district) MPs and list MPs in Germany differ in the geographic focus of their social-media posts, introducing a two-dimensional measure that captures both how local referenced places are and how deprived those places are. The paper combines computational place extraction with deprivation linkage to compare the self-presentation of all members of the 19th German Bundestag on Twitter and Facebook.
This study asks whether politicians’ “public personality” traits—specifically agency and communion—can be measured at scale from their public statements using computational text analysis. The authors propose a theory-driven, domain-specific operationalization of agency and communion and compare multiple computational approaches to extract these traits from a large corpus that includes parliamentary speeches, social media posts, and interviews. They validate their approach with human-labeled data, functional tests, and targeted analyses of German politicians and the 2024 U.S. presidential debate featuring Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. The paper reports that prompting-based techniques, especially with advanced models like DeepSeek-V3, performed better than supervised and semisupervised alternatives, while noting this is a multimethod feasibility study rather than a definitive measurement standard.
Residential mobility is a common life event, but its political consequences for local democracy are underexplored. Hans Lueders asks whether moving homes weakens how people engage with local government and community life—an issue that matters for local accountability, turnout, and civic infrastructure.
Party leaders control which names appear on ballots, and their choices shape how representative parliaments look. Malu Gatto and Marco Radojevic ask whether party elites respond when women are visibly underrepresented on candidate lists—do selectors nominate more women when the gender gap is highlighted?
Tom Arend, Fabio Ellger, and António Valentim investigate how voters respond when a new, disruptive party enters the scene. Past work has emphasized backlash to the radical right; this study tests whether similar dynamics follow other disruptive entrants—here, Green parties—at a moment of growing polarization and party-system fragmentation.
Pepinsky, Goodman, and Ziller (2024, American Political Science Review, PGZ) reevaluate a recent study on the long-term consequences of concentration camps in Germany and conclude that controlling for contemporary (post-treatment) state heterogeneity yields unbiased estimates of camps' effects on present-day outgroup intolerance.
Group-based identities shape political competition, and politicians frequently craft appeals aimed at particular social groups. In this article, Tabea Palmtag (BJPS) investigates a common campaign strategy—place-based appeals that invoke urban or rural identity—and asks when such appeals improve candidate evaluations and when they backfire.
The authors ask whether distinct state actions—learning demands, compliance demands, and sanctions—affect how citizens perceive welfare policy, beneficiaries, and the administering agency. Using a factorial survey experiment framed around German unemployment benefits, the study aims to distinguish which kinds of administrative burdens produce shifts in policy support, spending expectations, and legitimacy judgments. The piece contributes by unpacking heterogeneous policy-feedback effects across conceptually different state actions rather than treating administrative burden as a single phenomenon.
Religious warnings from the Catholic Church against Nazism failed to sway voters. Catholics were significantly less likely than Protestants to support the NSDAP, despite explicit discouragement.
Using novel geocoded data on local public sector jobs and politicians' residences, this study analyzes the effects of municipal mergers in Germany's LÄnder from 1994 to 2013.
This research investigates how policymakers interpret signals during high-stakes diplomacy, focusing on the 1958-63 standoff. Contrary to conventional wisdom that emphasizes public and private communications, findings demonstrate material actions exert a stronger influence.
In this study, we analyze German citizens' attitudes toward liberal democracy using probability-based samples collected between 1982 and 2018. We address two key gaps in the literature: first, by examining support for specific elements of liberal democracy rather than just generic democratic principles; second, by carefully disentangling age-related generational change from time period effects.
Political scientists commonly rely on a single left–right scale to measure ideology, but the labels “left” and “right” are abstract and may evoke different meanings for different people. Paul C. Bauer, Pablo Barberá, Kathrin Ackermann, and Aaron Venetz ask whether these varying associations threaten the comparability of left–right self-placement and could introduce bias into empirical studies of ideology.
Political decision-making often relies on arbitrary population thresholds to determine local government structures. This article examines how such rules shape municipal governance across different European contexts.