German politics is characterized by high levels of vertical integration between different political levels. That becomes most obvious at regional state elections in which national issues and parties’ constellations have predominantly been of highest importance for voters making up their choice. However, although widely accepted, this “second-order hypothesis” disregards to some extent that electoral effects depend on various campaign stimuli including political parties’ campaign activities. Against this background, we interpret historical low turnouts at almost all state elections during the reign of the second grand coalition in Germany (2005-2009) primarily as a result of stalemated coalition partners on the national level that have out-ruled direct campaign confrontations between Social Democrats and Christian Democrats and emphasized state-specific issues and candidates. As a consequence, national momentum at state elections should have become more important as the next federal parliamentary elections were approaching – beginning with the 2008 spring-elections. To empirically test this assumption of nationally penetrated respectively decoupled regional campaigns we have to change our focus: from voters to actors (i.e. political parties) and from the national to the state level of politics (both seldom done in electoral studies and political communications). In doing so, we will present results of an on-going survey of campaign managers which were in charge of conducting parties’ regional campaigns during the 16th legislative period, i.e. between March 2006 and August 2009.
