Whether it’s taking in refugees, keeping the swimming pool open or deciding on the location of the new nursery – local elected representatives shape policy in towns and municipalities. Political scientist Markus Tepe wants to examine in more detail which factors influence their election and voter turnout.
QUESTION: You are launching a research project on local elections. To put it somewhat provocatively: many people might initially yawn at the idea – after all, you yourself assume there is persistent voter apathy at local level. So what is actually so exciting about local elections?
TEPE: There are various aspects to this. From a political-sociological perspective, I would say that when we look at political figures in Germany, most of them get their start in politics at the local level. It is the place where political engagement takes place and where political figures are recruited. At the same time, the local authority is where citizens come into contact with the state. This involves issues of public services – be it the nursery or the swimming pool – but major political issues such as the reception of refugees also play out at local authority level. To look at it from the perspective of the history of ideas: Democracy needs places, and the local authority is precisely the frame of reference.
QUESTION: What are you planning to do in your project that has been missing from research into local elections so far?
TEPE: What is missing is not so much the interesting questions, but rather the means to answer them systematically. First and foremost, we need a data foundation, even if that may sound trivial. There is certainly a vast repository of data, particularly at the State Office for Statistics, and the first step is to unearth this treasure trove and compile it in such a way that we obtain an aggregated dataset with which we can carry out statistical analysis.
QUESTION: What do you need to bring together to achieve this?
TEPE: On the one hand, these are the election results and voter turnout; on the other, we combine these with certain structural characteristics of the local authorities: economic performance, socio-demographic characteristics, but also areas with established political traditions, the stability of which we know nothing about.
QUESTION: Do you mean so-called party strongholds?
TEPE: Exactly. To give an example: last summer semester, we surveyed members of the state parliament to find out to what extent they were able to influence their election results through their own campaigns. The percentages turned out to be rather marginal, because they assume there is a high degree of consistency in political attitudes and voting behaviour – in other words, strong party loyalty among voters.
QUESTION: At the same time, a great many independent candidates are successful at local level.
TEPE: That’s where the pattern breaks, so to speak. From the MPs’ perspective, state parliamentary constituencies are fairly stable, but when we look at the local level, a candidate’s party affiliation says less about what they stand for – it may depend more on the individual.
QUESTION: You said there is no shortage of interesting issues. Party loyalty is one aspect. Is there another example?
TEPE: One is the question of the extent to which the political balance of power influences budgets and the setting of priorities. Can we observe that the ‘political colour’ of the local council can be linked, for example, to a particular local economic policy? And conversely, is it the case that when certain economic indicators in the local authority change, the electoral prospects for certain parties or candidates also improve? What we naturally always want to demonstrate is causality – this is difficult with observational data, but at least we can draw on a panel dataset covering a longer period.
QUESTION: Are you looking at the local elections of the last two decades – for each and every one of the 991 local authorities?
TEPE: Yes, that is one of the challenges. You first have to familiarise yourself with the local government structure of Lower Saxony; that also took a bit of time in the run-up to the study.
QUESTION: Well, this is, first and foremost, a research project at state level, funded by the ‘Pro Niedersachsen’ programme. You want to make all the data freely accessible on a web portal – could something like this also serve as a model beyond the state’s borders?
TEPE: I’ve certainly noticed that there’s growing interest amongst my colleagues in this local level. The situation where data is available but not further processed also exists in other Federal States. It would be good if a local government database were to be established there too. For example, I have contact with colleagues from Baden-Württemberg, and in my subjective view, this is a field that’s developing. In my opinion, local authorities – as the arena of politics in close dialogue with citizens – are becoming more interesting again.
QUESTION: You mentioned at the start some of the issues in local politics: where will the new nursery be built, will the swimming pool be closed, where will we house refugees? Yet, in the most recent local elections, only one in two people cast their vote. Do many people underestimate the importance of these elections, and are you hoping for a reversal of this trend – perhaps also through the new insights your web portal is designed to provide?
TEPE: That would, of course, be lovely. The main aim here is to make it clearer what local politics actually does and how it operates. In many areas, local authorities have very little room for manoeuvre – and where they can make decisions and shape policy, it often seems, at first glance, to affect only specific groups of people. Take childcare, for example: anyone with children becomes sensitive to issues such as nursery fees, staff-to-child ratios, location and opening hours. And then you realise: that’s local politics. In this project, we want to make this aspect of politics more visible to everyone and get to the bottom of how it works.