No sign of decline. The personnel renewal of the parties in the nomination of candidates for federal and state elections

from Daniel Hellmann and Danny Schindler

DOI: 10.36206/BP2022.09

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.

The most important facts in brief:

1. The recruitment of political personnel for elections is a core function of political parties. As part of the new IParl research project CandiData, the range of candidates of all parties running in elections to the Bundestag, state parliaments and the European Parliament is being analysed longitudinally.
2. Initial analyses show an astonishingly high average renewal rate of 60 per cent for the period 2013 to 2022. This means that around six out of ten candidates are newcomers, i.e. they have never stood in an election before.
3. However, the innovation rate varies significantly between 31 and 83 per cent depending on the election.
4. The CDU and CSU have a rather low renewal rate compared to other parties. For the AfD, a clear adjustment to the other parties can be seen in the longitudinal average. The increasingly declining rate of newcomers after the party was founded can also be explained by the increase in incumbents.