What Drives the Nationalization of Local Party Manifestos?

Numerous times, the local level has been described as “school of democracy” where citizens have the easiest possibility to get in contact with and to participate in politics. Yet, research on local party competition has long been seen as “terra incognita”. The local level in Germany, in particular, has been described as ‘apolitical’, more oriented towards a consensual political style and with local parties only playing a minor role. Recent studies, however, show that parties matter on the local level, especially if local issues are getting politicized. Local councillors do want to implement their policy programmes. Furthermore, local elections – in particular in larger cities – are often seen as a ‘trend indicator’ for public opinion, directly feeding in policy considerations of regional and national politicians. Hence, party competition in municipalities and cities is getting increasingly important for parties in the German multilevel political system in order to secure votes, gain offices and implement policies relevant for party supporters. At the local level, however, the major parties, which are also represented in the regional or national parliament, not only compete with each other but also with smaller parties and independent local lists. Whereas in smaller municipalities independent local lists are well represented, party competition in larger cities is characterised by a higher degree of “party politicisation”. Therefore, party systems and party competition in German cities not only seem to be very distinct from the ones on the regional and national level but also from the ones in smaller municipalities. Based on this observation, we address three research questions regarding party systems and party competition in German cities: 1. which factors explain the differences between party systems in German cities? 2. To what extent do party systems in German cities differ from the regional and rational ones? 3. How do local party organisations position themselves in the political space, i.e., how is party competition structured at the local level? We will answer the first two questions by analysing local, regional and national election results from 1990 to 2016 in 78 German cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants, which is the most widely used threshold in the local politics literature. In a first step, we descriptively assess both the differences in party strength and party system fragmentation across cities and across political levels. In a second step, we analyse if party system differences between cities can be attributed to economic, social and political factors. Focusing on the dynamics of party competition (RQ3), we use a subset of the cities to assess if and how local parties shift their policy positions from election to election and which factors influence these positional shifts. This analysis relies on data from the ‘Local Manifesto Project’ (LMP) by estimating local party positions using fully-computerised, automatic quantitative text analysis procedures since existing research has demonstrated that these methods provide new insights for understanding local party competition.