Data of the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES)

The German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES; http://www.gles.eu/index.en.htm) is the largest national election study ever undertaken in Germany. Over three subsequent periods of funding, it examines the German federal elections 2009, 2013, and 2017. The data generated by this study allow analyses of the electoral process over an extended period of time and at an unprecedented level of detail. Using state-of-the art methodologies, the project aims to generate a comprehensive, complex, and integrated data base that links cross-sectional with longitudinal data, both short-term and long-term. Its design combines a broad variety of interlocking and complementary data sources, including several surveys of voters and candidates as well as various analyses of media content. It spans three subsequent elections, covering both campaign periods and the time in-between elections. The study seeks to address all major theories and concepts of electoral behaviour in a comprehensive manner, but at the same time has a special focus on processes of political communication and electoral information flows.

The GLES is funded by the German National Science Community (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG) and carried out in close cooperation with GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences (http://www.gesis.org/en/home/) and the German Society for Electoral Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Wahlforschung DGfW; cf. http://dgfw.eu/index.php?lang=en). The principal investigators are Hans Rattinger (University of Mannheim), Sigrid Roßteutscher (University of Frankfurt), Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck (University of Mannheim), Bernhard Weßels (Social Science Research Center Berlin), and Christof Wolf (GESIS Mannheim).

All data generated by this hitherto most comprehensive program of German electoral research are treated as a public good and made immediately accessible to all interested social scientists worldwide for free download (http://www.gesis.org/en/elections-homme/gles/). To improve access and utility of the GLES data for the international scientific community English language versions of the most important data sets collected at the 2009 German federal election and their documentation have been prepared and are already freely available or will be available soon to all interested researchers:

•  A cross-section survey conducted face to face in two evenly split waves, one pre- one post-election (N = 4,288; 882 variables)

•  A pre-post panel survey conducted by telephone with the pre-election wave run as a rolling cross-section survey over two months with 100 per day on average (N = 6,008 (first wave) resp. 4,027 (second wave), 536 variables)

•  A seven-wave campaign panel conducted online (N = 4,552, 3540 variables)

•  A three-wave long-term panel conducted face-to-face covering the federal elections 2002, 2005 and 2009 (N = 1,107, 802 variables; release of English-language dataset planned for mid April 2012)

•  A content analysis of TV primetime news on the four most important public and commercial channels during the election campaign (news reports and statements from 364 newscasts, 115 variables)

  In addition to these datasets the GLES offers a quarterly series of online tracking surveys for which regularly calls for questions are issued to the scientific community, as well as data from a mixed-methods sub-project on the televised debate of the large parties' chancellor candidates (experimental, survey, content and RTR data). While also freely accessible to all interested scientists, these data so far are only available in German.

  Contact:

  Prof. Dr. Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck
  Chair of Political Science – Political Sociology University of Mannheim
  D-68131 Mannheim
  Email: schmitt-beck@uni-mannheim.d