German Election Database

Elections are the key mechanism through which voters hold elected officials accountable. The partisan composition of local, state, and national legislatures and governments, in turn, influences key policy choices and public goods provision. Yet studying issues of representation, government responsiveness, and partisan politics across different levels of government, in particular at the local level, has been difficult. We often lack comprehensive, comparable, and harmonized election results at small-scale units such as municipalities. This paper introduces a new panel dataset of local, state, and federal election results in Germany at the municipality level with coverage for the past decades. Our data includes turnout and partisan vote shares for all major parties. We harmonize the data to address municipal boundary changes and to account for mail-in districts, providing researchers with a consistent panel of municipalities in their 2021 boundaries as well as corresponding municipal and county boundary shapefiles. Our dataset will facilitate new research on representation and responsiveness across all levels of government and how political dynamics have changed over time.