Electoral Integrity in Germany: populists, absentee voting, and a failed state election

Debates about perceptions of electoral integrity have finally reached Germany in recent years. With the "Alternative for Germany", a right-wing populist party has established itself in the German party system that repeatedly and systematically questions the integrity of electoral processes. Absentee voting is growing significantly in popularity - a factor that is time and again associated with issues of electoral integrity and, moreover, has experienced a popularity boost as a result of the Corona pandemic. Finally, recent elections in Germany have also produced very different outcomes (and government compositions) - the relevant literature has also repeatedly linked the outcome (i.e., winning or losing) of an election to perceptions of electoral integrity. The common feature of these various factors – populist attitudes and actors, absentee voting, winning/losing an election – is that there are no objective links between them and electoral integrity; rather, they are mere projections. In fact, the quality of elections worldwide has been evaluated by the Electoral Integrity Project ever since 2012. The project attested high electoral integrity to the two German federal elections examined so far (2013 and 2017), achieving scores of 81 (2017) and 80 (2013) on the Perceptions of Electoral Integrity Index. This puts Germany in 6th place among the 167 countries included in the study. Only the Scandinavian countries fared slightly better. But even that has changed recently in Germany: The elections that took place in Berlin in September 2021 were marked by massive glitches and problems: long waits outside polling stations, temporary closures of polling stations, and problems with ballots. As a result, the Berlin Constitutional Court ruled that the 2021 state elections were null and void and the entire election had to be repeated. This repeat state election took place in February 2023. Based on various surveys - representative polls on the 2017 and 2021 federal elections, but also studies on the Berlin repeat election - we want to use the proposed paper to analyze the extent to which perceptions of electoral integrity are shaped by the actual experience of electoral breakdowns and problems, by winning or losing elections, or else by projections of predispositions.