Candidates in the 2005 Bundestag Election: Mode of Candidacy, Campaigning and Issues

Abstract

Electoral campaigns are conducted by parties and candidates to convince the people to turn out to vote and to vote for them instead of voting for a competitor. In parliamentary democracies, and especially in those that apply electoral systems of proportional representation with closed party lists, parties and their top candidates for prime minister or for chancellor are considered to be the main actors in campaigns. Consequently, electoral campaigns are primarily party campaigns which are neither won nor lost by any ‘average’ candidate. Parties structure the electoral competition by collectively emphasising certain issues and by presenting a rather cohesive ideological perspective in a campaign. Further, candidates and elected MPs are first and foremost representatives of their parties with very limited personal room for political manoeuvre. While this assessment is not challenged in principle, we argue that it cuts too short. In addition to parties, candidates play important roles in electoral campaigns, and due to the modernisation of parties and campaigns, we expect a substantial degree of personalised campaigning which is likely to increase in the future. Given the particular mixed-member electoral system used to elect the German Bundestag, we are able to differentiate the campaign of pure constituency candidates, pure list candidates and the most frequent hybrids who ran for office both in a constituency and on a party list in 2005.

Notes

1. Hans Meyer, Wahlsystem und Verfassungsordnung. Bedeutung und Grenzen wahlsystematischer Gestaltung nach dem Grundgesetz (Frankfurt: Metzner, 1973), p.26.

2. Matthew Sobert Shugart and Martin P. Wattenberg (eds), Mixed-Member Electoral Systems: The Best of Both Worlds? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

3. A party can qualify by either receiving 5 per cent of all party votes or by winning three constituencies. For a detailed description of Germany's electoral system see Dieter Nohlen, ‘Germany’, in Dieter Nohlen, Matthias Catón, and Philip Stöver (eds), Elections in Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

4. Thomas Zittel and Thomas Gschwend, ‘Der Bundestagswahlkampf 2005 und kollektive Repräsentation: Ein kurzer Anlauf zum langen Abschied?’, paper presented at the annual meeting of the Deutsche Vereinigung für Politische Wissenschaft (DVPW) Arbeitskreis Wahlen und politische Einstellungen, Berlin, 19–21 July 2006.

5. The authors are thankful for a Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) grant (ZI 608/4-1) which enabled us to conduct mail interviews with the constituency candidates, and for additional funds provided by the Mannheimer Zentrum für Europäische Sozialforschung (MZES) which made possible to also include the pure list candidates. The overall response rate was 45 per cent. For more information on the survey and on the study see http://www.mzes.uni-mannheim.de/ projekte/gcs/. It is planned to ask the core questions of this study in other countries as well. Italian, Austrian and Portuguese surveys have already been conducted or are being organised, and many more countries are about to follow. The authors would like to especially thank Wolfgang C. Müller for his cooperation in establishing the comparative candidate project at the MZES and to realise the study in Austria. A start-up conference, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation with researchers of about 20 countries, takes place in the Mannheim area in early October 2006.

6. Pippa Norris, A Virtuous Circle. Political Communication in Postindustrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

7. See e.g. the contributions to Party Politics 9/5 (2003); see also Andrea Römmele, Direkte Kommunikation zwischen Parteien und Wählern: Professionalisierte Wahlkampftechnologien in den USA und der BRD (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002).

8. Rachel Gibson and Andrea Römmele, ‘A Party-Centered Theory of Professionalized Campaigning’, The Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 6/4 (2001), pp.31–43, p.34.

9. Zittel and Gschwend, ‘Der Bundestagswahlkampf 2005’.

10. Hermann Schmitt and Andreas M. Wüst, ‘Direktkandidaten bei der Bundestagswahl 2002: Politische Agenda und Links-Rechts-Selbsteinstufung im Vergleich zu den Wählern’, in Frank Brettschneider et al. (eds), Bundestagswahl 2002: Analysen der Wahlergebnisse und des Wahlkampfes (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2004), pp.303–25.

11. Hanna F. Pitkin, The Concept of Representation (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1967), p.209.

12. See Edmund Burke, The Writings and Speeches of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London: Oxford University Press, 1906), vol.2, p.89; Heinz Eulau and John Wahlke, The Politics of Representation (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1978); Werner J. Patzelt, Abgeordnete und Repräsentation. Amtsverständnis und Wahlkreisarbeit (Passau: Rothe, 1993), pp.27ff.

13. Jane Mansbridge, ‘Rethinking Representation’, American Political Science Review 97/4 (2003), pp.515–28.

14. American Political Science Association, ‘Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System’, American Journal of Political Science 42/1 (1950), pp.55–96; Evron Kirkpatrick, ‘Toward a more responsible two-party system’, American Political Science Review 65/4 (1971), pp.165–77; Norman R. Luttbeg, ‘Political Linkage in a Large Society’, in Norman R. Luttbeg (ed.) Public Opinion and Public Policy: Models of Linkage (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey, 1974); Warren Miller, et al. (eds), Policy Representation in Western Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999); Hermann Schmitt, Politische Repräsentation in Europa (Frankfurt: Campus, 2001).

15. Johannes Agnoli et al., Auf dem Weg zum Einparteienstaat (Wiesbaden: WDV, 1977).

16. Hermann Schmitt and Andreas M. Wüst, ‘The Extraordinary Bundestag Election of 2005: The Interplay of Long-term Trends and Short-term Factors’, German Politics and Society 24/1 (2006), pp.27–46, p.32.

17. Andrea Römmele, ‘Personen oder Inhalte. Politikvermittlung in deutschen Wahlkämpfen’, in Jürgen W. Falter et al., Wahlen und Wähler. Analysen aus Anlass der Bundestagswahl 2002 (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2005), pp.414–33.

18. This move to the right could also have been observed on the voters' side, cf. Dieter Roth and Andreas M. Wüst, ‘Abwahl ohne Machtwechsel: Die Bundestagswahl 2005 im Lichte längerfristiger Entwicklungen’, in Eckhard Jesse and Roland Sturm (eds), Bilanz der Bundestagswahl 2005: Voraussetzungen – Ergebnisse – Folgen (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2006), pp.43–70.

19. Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, ‘The Left-Right Schema’, in M. Kent Jennings and Jan van Deth (eds), Continuities in Political Action (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1990), pp.203–34.

20. Cees van der Eijk et al., ‘Left–Right Orientations’ in Jacques Thomassen (ed.), The European Voter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp.167–91.

21. See for example Gary Marks et al., ‘Party Competition and European Integration in East and West: Different Structure, Same Causality’, Comparative Political Studies 39/2 (2006), pp.155–75.