‘Macht vor Ort’: Gendered Power and Representation in Local Politics in Schleswig-Holstein

Local politics is a crucial yet often overlooked arena of political power. It is here that citizens encounter democracy most directly, where political careers typically begin, and where inclusion and exclusion are most tangible. Despite this significance, the gendered dynamics of power and representation at the local level remain underexplored—largely due to limited and uneven data availability. This paper presents the project 'Macht vor Ort' ('Power at the Local Level'), which examines how gender, local institutional structures, and political cultures shape participation and representation in Schleswig-Holstein, one of Germany’s sixteen federal states. Since no official database of local representatives exists, the project reconstructed who was actually elected by merging official election results with council records, creating an original dataset of over 1,000 representatives. These individuals are surveyed to collect data on motivations, recruitment, political self-efficacy, time and resource constraints, and views on gender equality. Linking these survey responses with contextual indicators such as municipal size, party type, and institutional arrangements provides a novel empirical foundation for studying local representation in Germany. Theoretically, the study draws on Lawless and Fox’s work on political ambition, Norris’s framework of gendered opportunity structures, and Holtkamp’s research on local political cultures. It examines how recruitment, motivation, political self-efficacy, and gender attitudes are shaped by both formal institutions and informal norms. The case of Schleswig-Holstein is particularly illuminating: its fragmented municipal structure and the prevalence of non-partisan Wählergemeinschaften (citizens’ lists) challenge conventional models of candidate selection and career progression. By integrating individual- and contextual-level data, 'Macht vor Ort' produces one of the few systematic datasets on local representation in a German federal state and advances our understanding of how gendered power relations are embedded and reproduced in local political arenas. Situating the findings within broader European debates on gender and political careers, the project highlights local politics as both a site of persistent exclusion and a potential laboratory for more inclusive democratic participation.