Anti-partyism in Local Politics: Conceptual Framework and Empirical Analysis of Individual and Contextual Factors

In the last few decades independent local lists in German local politics have developed as serious competitors to national parties. In some regions they even dominate the political competition. But despite their widespread presence and success, party researchers have ignored the phenomenon of local voter associations for a long time: Until the middle of the last decade, only a few case and regional studies had focused on these non-parties. Up to now, empirical evidence for Germany is still missing, concerning their attitudes towards established parties and the democratic process. So it is unknown whether their self-described picture as non-parties or even anti-parties is rooted in the beliefs of their members and manifests itself in the political decisions of their representatives in the local arena. Therefore, in the paper I conceptualize anti-partyism in a first step and take explicitly the local level into consideration. I plead for an analytical distinction between anti-partyism relating to (a) parties at the local- and higher levels of the political system as well as a rejection of (b) specific parties or parties in general (based on Poguntke 1996). Then I aim for analyzing the consequences of different patterns of local politics and individual determinants to explain the degree of anti-party sentiment among the members of independent local list. To test the hypotheses I use multi-level regression models, based on representative cross-sectional data from the ‘FREIE WÄHLER membership study 2015’ (own, merged dataset with individual and contextual variables).