Local Party Systems in Germany

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According to the actor-centered institutionalism (by Mayntz and Scharpf) local party systems can be recognized as constellation of political actors in each municipality. There are three main local actors: parties, independent local lists and individual candidates. It is assumed that these actor constellations differ between more than 10,000 German municipalities due to local idiosyncrasies.The structural characteristics of national and local party systems are very similar. The number of local actors, their proportions and their changes over time have to be highlighted. However, international comparative local government studies emphasizes that local party systems are not necessarily copies of the national party system.The project aims at the identification of such multiple local party systems and their development patterns since 1990. Both have also to be explained systematically in cross-sectional and longitudinal design on the basis of four bundles of causal factors. These include: (1) local political culture, (2) changes in the local election laws, (3) degree of organization of local political actors, and (4) structural context effects.The study is based on the continuation of a local elections database that was created in the Collaborative Research Centre 580. It includes all elections of local parliaments between 1990 and 2010 in the 13 German area states. And the data will be continued up to the local elections in Hesse and Lower Saxony in 2016.The typology of the local party systems is using exploratory cluster center analysis. That causes the highest intracluster homogenity simultaneously with a complete intercluster heterogenity. The change of local party systems is observed as their "political life course" in particular municipalities by drafts upon sequence analysis. These methods offer an innovative solution for the problem that regional reforms may change the territories and numbers of municipalities over time. In the investigation period this was foremost the case in East Germany. The clusters of local party systems and their changes over time shall be explained by discriminant function analysis according to the former mentioned four bundles of causal factors.The study answers a lot of open questions. Small parties, independent local lists and independent candidates are often summarized in local election results under the category "others". The systematic distinction between these local groupings allows to analyse their growing local significance and to undesrstand their local impacts on the German national party system.