Without candidates, elections would be impossible. They fulfill an important task for the functioning of parliamentary democracy by providing the voters with a choice on the ballot. During its project on candidate nomination for the 2017 Bundestag election, IParl researched who was running, who decided on the chances of success of any given candidacy and which criteria affected nominations. Based on these findings, the CandiData-project aims at identifying long-term developments in candidate selection. Do the same persons compete on every occasion or do the parties renew their candidate supply? Are there recognizable patterns by which the candidates manoeuvre the multi-level electoral systems in Germany? Under which conditions will candidates be nominated in a way that allows them to enter parliament?
To answer these and more questions, CandiData provides a continuously growing dataset. During the first project phase, we gathered the complete records of all candidates at 47 elections at the state and federal level as well as from elections to the European Parliament in Germany between 2013 and 2025. The dataset is expanded with every new election. Additionally, we strive to include candidates from elections before 2013 to improve our long-term analysis capabilities.
If you have any questions or comments, please contact Dr Danny Schindler and/or Daniel Hellmann.
To date, the CandiData project has produced the following publications and working papers:
Aus dem Westen importiert? Wer tritt bei den Ostwahlen an by Daniel Hellmann
In September, voters in Saxony, Thuringia and Brandenburg will be called upon to elect new state parliaments. Once again, it is to be expected that identity as an East German will also play a role in the East German elections. As studies show, East Germans hold very few leading positions in relation to their share of the population - even in the new federal states themselves. Whether this also applies to the candidates standing for election is analysed below. Are East Germans descriptively over- or under-represented among the candidates? How has this developed over time? And is the attribution "East German party" also reflected in the candidate portfolio?
Wer tritt eigentlich zur Europawahl an? by Daniel Hellmann
To coincide with the European elections, Daniel Hellmann, Research Fellow at the Institute for Parliamentary Research, analyses the socio-demographic profile of the candidates who want to enter the European Parliament this year. Based on current data, he argues that many a cliché about the European Parliament - keyword: "If you have a grandad, send him to Europe" - cannot be upheld. Instead, empirical evidence shows that seats in the European Parliament are particularly competitive and that the field of candidates is younger than in the 2021 Bundestag elections, for example.
2022: Kein Anzeichen von Niedergang. Die personelle Erneuerung der Parteien bei der Kandidatenaufstellung für Bundestags- und Landtagswahlen by Daniel Hellmann and Danny Schindler
As part of the new IParl research project CandiData, the range of candidates put forward by the parties for parliamentary elections in Germany is being analysed longitudinally. To date, all candidates nominated for state, federal and European elections since 2013 have been analysed. In this Focus section, we present the project and, as a first step, examine the question of how high the renewal rate of the parties, understood as the proportion of newcomers among all candidates, is. Newcomers are defined as people who have never stood for election before - whether in the constituency or on the party list and regardless of the candidate level (state, federal, European). It turns out that around six out of ten nominees were standing for the very first time. This is not a sign of the often claimed decline of the parties. There is also clearly no downward trend for the period under review.
Always the same old faces? - Candidate turnover and the recruitment power of German state level parties, by Daniel Hellmann and Danny Schindler
Finding individuals who are willing to invest time and money in (often unpromising) parliamentary candidacies is a challenging task for parties. In times of decreasing party memberships, it might be even more difficult to find new candidates who did not compete for an election so far. Yet, it is vital for Germany's party democracy that parties can attract candidates and renew their pool of citizens running for public office. This indicates the parties' recruitment power and the overall responsiveness of electoral representation (Koskimaa et al. 2021).
Against this background, the paper investigates the number of candidates and their renewal rate from one election to another, i.e. the share of new faces among them, for all federal and state level elections since 2013. The unique dataset includes more than 40,000 candidacies across 37 elections. While scholars so far primarily focused on one level (such as Manow 2012 for German federal elections and Koskimaa et al. 2021 for Finland), on intraparty advancement (for example Ohmura et al 2018) or on the multilevel careers of MPs (like Detterbeck 2010), our data allow us to combine those approaches in order to draw a broad picture of multi-level candidacies.
The analysis investigates both legal-institutional factors (like variants of the electoral system and the available parliamentary seats) as well as party specific attributes (like electoral performance and membership size) as determinants of candidate renewal. It reveals that most variables either directly matter or indirectly affect the share of newcomers by altering the overall number of candidates running. Moreover, we show that parties still attract a surprisingly high share of around 60 per cent new nominees for each election. Hence, they are still able to fulfil their recruitment function in challenging times.
The paper was presented at the annual conference of the Ak Parteienforschung from 7 to 8 October in Trier.
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