Exception or Trend? Declining Representation of Women in German Parliaments

A decade-long upward trend has been reversed for the last few years in Germany; the proportion of women in parliaments is falling again for the first time. Whether in the German federal elections in 2017 or various state elections since 2015, fewer and fewer women are moving into the parliaments. This phenomenon also seems to be particularly strong in the presumably more emancipated eastern part of Germany. In empirical research on representation, two approaches are well established to explain the differences in the representation rates of women: (1) The ideological orientation of parties and (2) the mechanisms of the electoral system. These approaches provide a useful theoretical basis for current situation in Germany. On the one hand, the widespread personalized election system with proportional representation, in which 50 percent of the seats are allocated according to the rules of majority voting and 50 percent of the seats according to the rules of proportional representation, leads to a special composition of parliaments in Germany: smaller parties are normally elected by the proportional representation system and larger parties by the majority voting system. Furthermore, the nomination and election chances of women in majority elections are significantly lower than those of men. For this reason, parties have so far tried to increase the recruitment of women through female list placements. However, the emergence of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a right-wing and male-dominated party does not pursue this strategy anymore. The thesis of the paper is that there has been a double dynamisation, which in combination can explain the declining proportion of women in parliaments. With the establishment of the AfD, there has not only been a party shift in mandates overall, but also a diametrical shift in list and constituency mandates. In the West, the list mandates that have so far been increasingly won by the small parties must now be shared with the male-dominated AfD. The weakening of the SPD has also led to a situation in the West where direct mandates are increasingly won by the CDU/CSU where men are also more likely to win. In the East, the AfD is large enough not only to win list mandates, but also to compete with the CDU for direct mandates. For this purpose, the nomination and representation rates of women and men in federal and state elections are examined longitudinal according to parties and electoral systems, with special attention to developments in the East. It will be shown how these two factors interact in a special way. It will be illustrated that the problem of the distribution of votes according to the majority principle in Germany can no longer be compensated by proportional representation.