Welcome to the Election Studies

GESIS has a large selection of data from studies on federal and state elections in Germany. Some of these are available in long time series, such as the database of representative surveys on all Bundestag elections since 1949. On these pages you will find an overview of the studies supervised by the Research Data Center Elections.

Since 2009, the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES) has been collecting methodologically diverse and high-quality data on the political attitudes and behaviour of eligible voters and candidates.

The annual cumulatives of the Politbarometer of the Elections Research Group provide a detailed picture of political opinions and attitudes.

Further individual and panel studies as well as cumulative studies are available for all Bundestag elections since 1949, as well as data from representative surveys collected in the run-up to the state elections.

Ongoing surveys - i.e. surveys independent of election dates - on political attitudes can be found in this section. The surveys include the ARD-DeutschlandTREND (since 1998), the Forsa-Bus (since 1991) and the surveys of the Federal Government.

GESIS also provides access to data collections from international election studies. Further information can be found at the Research Data Centre for International Survey Programmes.

Election data
Here you will find a comprehensive database on federal and state elections, as well as on surveys between elections. These are available in various user-friendly versions with detailed documentation.

Who is the service for?
The data allow long-term analyses of political attitudes, voting intentions and important issues at the time of the election. The data are an important source for electoral and democracy research, but also for the study of changes in political and social attitudes in German society.
They are also suitable for teaching and training, e.g. in political science or for methods of empirical social research.

Do you have questions about the election data?
Use the ELECTIONS FORUM or contact us.

To the Forum Elections

Publications

In order to keep the bibliography and the annual report as complete and up-to-date as possible, we rely on your help. Please report your publications and send us an e-mail with all the necessary information.

The list of publications of the GLES can be found on the GLES website.

The Politbarometer bibliography provides an overview of publications based on the Politbarometer data collected. The bibliography includes specialist articles, contributions to monographs and anthologies, as well as "grey literature". The information is based on the authors' own research and reports, no guarantee can be given for completeness. If your contribution is missing, please send us the bibliographic information by e-mail. The FDZ Annual Report documents the work of the Research Data Center "Elections" in the respective calendar year and is part of the quality assurance of GESIS.

The list of publications in the Annual Report includes publications written on the basis of the data provided by the Research Data Centre "Elections". Please report your publications and send us an e-mail with all the necessary information.

Related links

Here you find some links related to elections in Germany:

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wahlforschung (DGfW)
German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES)
Arbeitskreis Wahlen und Politische Einstellungen der DVPW

Federal and European elections
Der Bundeswahlleiter

State and local elections
Baden-Württemberg
Bavaria
Berlin
Brandenburg
Bremen
Hamburg
Hessen
Mecklenburg-West Pomerania
Lower Saxony
North Rhine-Westphalia
Rhineland-Palatinate
Saarland
Saxony
Saxony-Anhalt
Schleswig-Holstein
Thuringia

German Data Forum

The Research Data Center (RDC) Elections has been accredited by the German Data Forum (RatSWD).

Since July 2016, the RatSWD has set up a Complaints Office. When using RDC data you will have the opportunity to address unresolved problems which you could not handle in exchange with the responsible contact person in the RDC. You can find the contact form, as well as details on the competence and procedure, on the website of the RatSWD.

Contact persons