Integration policies are at the core of party competition in many Western European democracies. Taking advantage of Germany’s multi-level political system where parties compete for votes on both the federal level and in 16 states on the regional level this paper offers an extensive analysis of various factors shaping party positions on integration policies. Analysing thounsands of statements related to integration policy from over 500 electoral manifestos and coalition agreements between 1990 and 2013 we find an interesting variance in policy positions both across different parties but also within parties from different federal states. We explain this variance by differences in electoral markets (e.g. prevailing attitudes towards immigrants) and structural factors (e.g. share of immigrant population) as well as factors of party competition (e.g. presence of right-extremist parties).
