Electoral research in Germany

Abstract

Systematic academic electoral research in Germany started in 1961 with the so-called «Cologne Election Study». Private institutes did use opinion poll techniques to conduct cross national surveys in order to inform their customers (including parties) since 1945. But from the sixties on until today there is a continuing academic electoral research in the intellectual traditions of the Columbia and the Michigan school as well as in using rational choice models. In the late sixties the media got interested in election-results and analysis and are today the main financiers for data collection. There are quite some links between electoral researchers and an impressive amount of publications to the subject f.i. the so-called «blue books» but there is no national election study so far, although there are plans for such a study as a nucleus module to allow innovative ideas in addition to continuing election studies as we had in the past.