Accepting refugees, maintaining the swimming pool or the location of the new kindergarten - local elected representatives shape politics in cities and municipalities. Political scientist Markus Tepe wants to take a closer look at the factors that play a role in their election and participation.
QUESTION: You are launching a research project on local elections. To put it a little provocatively: Many people may yawn at first - after all, you are also assuming that there is persistent voter fatigue at municipal level. What is actually exciting about the local elections?
TEPE: There are various facets. From a political-sociological perspective, I would say that if we look at the political personnel in Germany, most people find their way into politics via the municipal level. It is the place where politicisation takes place and political personnel are recruited. At the same time, the municipality is the place where citizens come into contact with the state. This involves issues of public services of general interest - be it the kindergarten or the swimming pool - but major political issues such as the reception of refugees also take place in the municipalities. To look at this in terms of the history of ideas: Democracy needs places, and the municipality is the frame of reference.
QUESTION: What are you planning to do in your project, what has been missing in local election research so far?
TEPE: What is missing is not so much the exciting questions, but rather the possibilities to answer them systematically. First of all, we need a data basis, even if that may sound trivial. There is certainly a large pool of data, especially at the State Statistical Office, and this treasure must first be collected and compiled in such a way that we can obtain an aggregated data set and work with it statistically.
QUESTION: What do you need to bring together for this?
TEPE: Firstly, the election results and voter turnout, which we then combine with certain structural characteristics of the municipalities: economic performance, socio-demographic characteristics, but also political traditions that we don't even know how stable they are.
QUESTION: Are you referring to so-called party strongholds?
TEPE: Exactly. To give you an example: Last summer semester, we asked members of the state parliament how much they were able to influence their election results with their own campaigns. These were rather marginal percentages, because they assume that there is a strong consistency in political attitudes and voting behaviour, i.e. a strong party loyalty among voters.
QUESTION: At the same time, many non-party candidates are successful at local level.
TEPE: That's where it breaks down, so to speak. The state parliament constituencies are quite stable from the MPs' point of view, but if we go down to the local level, it's less clear from the party label what a candidate stands for - there it may depend more on individuals.
QUESTION: You said that there is no shortage of exciting questions. Party loyalty is one aspect. Is there another example?
TEPE: One is the question of the extent to which political majorities change budgets and prioritisation. Can we observe that the "colour" of the municipal council can be linked to a certain municipal economic policy, for example? And conversely, does a change in certain economic indicators in the municipality also increase the electoral chances of certain parties or candidates? Of course, what we always want to show is causality - this is difficult with observational data, but at least we can draw on a panel dataset with a longer time period.
QUESTION: Are you looking at the local elections of the last two decades - in relation to each of the 991 municipalities?
TEPE: Yes, that is one of the challenges. You first have to familiarise yourself with the municipal structure of Lower Saxony, which also took a bit of time in the run-up.
QUESTION: Well, this is initially a research project relating to the state level, which is being funded by the "Pro Niedersachsen" programme. You want to make all the data freely accessible on a web portal - is something like this also a role model beyond the state borders?
TEPE: I have already noticed that there is increased interest in this municipal level among my colleagues. The fact that data is available but not further processed is a situation that also exists in other Federal States. It would be nice if a municipal database could be created there too. I am in contact with colleagues from Baden-Württemberg, for example, and in my subjectively coloured assessment, this is a field that is developing. In my opinion, municipalities as a place of politics in close dialogue with citizens are becoming more exciting again.
QUESTION: You mentioned local politics at the beginning: where will the new kindergarten go, will the swimming pool be closed, where will we house refugees? Yet only one in two people voted in the local elections recently. Do many people underestimate this election and are you hoping for a trend reversal - perhaps also thanks to the new insights that your web portal is intended to provide?
TEPE: That would be nice, of course. First of all, it's about making what local politics does and how it presents itself more visible. In many areas, they have very little room for manoeuvre - and where they can decide and shape something, it often only affects individual groups of people at first glance. Take childcare, for example: anyone who has children becomes sensitive to issues such as daycare fees, staffing ratios, location and opening hours. And then you realise: this is local politics. In the project, we want to make this policy more visible to everyone and get to the bottom of its mechanisms.