Based on a novel election survey fielded in the context of the federal election of 2017, the paper analyzes the formal and informal political participation of migrant voters in Germany. For electoral research, voters with migrant background provide a theoretically interesting group, since their political socialization differs from the experiences of the native population in many ways. Whether established theories of electoral research can also explain political participation of voters with migrant background, or whether this is determined predominantly by migrant-specific characteristics, therefore is the central research question of this study. The paper focuses on Germany’s two biggest groups of migrant voters: people from Turkey and people migrated from the former Soviet-Union and its successor-states, pointing to group-, generation- and legal status differences for the participation of migrant voters.
