Heddesheimer Vincent, Hilbig Hanno, Sichart Florian, Wiedemann Andreas
Princeton University, Department of Politics, Princeton, NJ, 08544, USA.
University of California, Davis, Department of Political Science, Davis, CA, 95616, USA.
Sci Data. 2025 Apr 14;12(1):618. doi: 10.1038/s41597-025-04811-5.
Elections are the key mechanism through which voters hold elected officials accountable. The partisan composition of local, state, and federal governments, in turn, shapes policy choices and public goods provision. Yet studying representation, government responsiveness, and partisan politics across multiple levels of government-especially at the local level-has been difficult due to inconsistently reported, incomplete, or insufficiently harmonized election data at small geographic scales. This paper introduces GERDA ( https://www.german-elections.com/ ), a panel dataset of local, state, and federal election results in Germany at the municipality level spanning the past three decades. GERDA includes turnout and vote shares for all major parties and resolves challenges arising from municipal boundary changes and joint mail-in voting districts, yielding a consistent panel of municipalities in their 2021 boundaries. We also provide municipal and county boundary shapefiles to facilitate spatial analyses. Our dataset enables new research on partisan politics, policy responsiveness, and political representation at fine-grained geographic scales and over time.
选举是选民让当选官员承担责任的关键机制。反过来，地方、州和联邦政府的党派构成塑造了政策选择和公共产品的提供。然而，由于小地理尺度上选举数据报告不一致、不完整或协调不足，研究跨多个政府层面的代表性、政府回应性和党派政治——尤其是在地方层面——一直很困难。本文介绍了GERDA（https://www.german - elections.com/），这是一个跨越过去三十年德国市级层面地方、州和联邦选举结果的面板数据集。GERDA包括所有主要政党的投票率和选票份额，并解决了因市政边界变化和联合邮寄投票区而产生的挑战，得出了2021年边界内一致的市政面板。我们还提供市政和县边界形状文件以方便进行空间分析。我们的数据集能够在细粒度地理尺度和随时间推移的情况下对党派政治、政策回应性和政治代表性进行新的研究。
