Political Participation / National Election Study

The chapter gives an overview of recent developments within participation and electoral research, and discusses the current state of affairs with regard to data provision and access. It concludes with several recommendations: (a) to tag a small number of key political variables as constant elements of the future question programmes of both the ALLBUS and the GSOEP, thereby creating substantial amounts of synergy at little marginal cost; (b) to establish a National Election Study in Germany by providing the current GLES project (which is funded by the DFG to study the 2009, 2013 and 2017 national elections) with a constant logistic and methodological support infrastructure by GESIS, and on the long run by providing a regular follow-up study to this project with a stable basis of reliable public funding and a firm institutional embedding, preferably by including it into the remit of GESIS; (c) to adapt the data services of the statistical offices in several respects more closely to the data requirements of participation and electoral research; (d) to establish a formal obligation for public agencies to submit survey data collected under their auspices in due time to the public domain for purposes of secondary analysis.