Constituency Campaigns in the 2005 German Federal Elections : Patterns, Motivations, and Effects

Local Campaigns are frequently studied phenomena in the context of first past the post voting systems such as the UK. They draw less attention in proportional list systems or mixedmember systems. Students of electoral politics assume for these systems a predominant role of political parties addressing national coalitions of voters. Parties are considered to act under a weak incentive to campaign in selective, district specific ways on the one hand, voters are in turn considered to focus on the national rather than the local campaign environment. This paper develops an alternative hypothesis for Germany’s mixed-member system. It tests this hypothesis with data from the German Candidate Study 2005. This test looks at the campaign norms and strategies of candidates in the 299 German districts to determine differences and similarities in campaign behavior and to understand the causes and electoral effects of different levels of constituency campaigning