The German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP) provides a new data infrastructure for studying political competition and representation at the local level in Germany. While election manifestos have long been an important source for analyzing party competition at the national level, systematic data on local election programmes remain scarce. GLMP addresses this gap by collecting and providing access to local election manifestos from German municipalities, thereby enabling comparative research on local party politics.
The project builds upon previous efforts to collect local manifesto data in Germany (see the Local Manifesto Project by Martin Gross and Michael Jankowski). GLMP substantially expands the empirical scope by including municipalities of different sizes and a broader range of political actors, including local branches of national parties as well as Independent Local Lists (ILL).
The current version of GLMP contains 2,307 local election manifestos from 306 political actors in 248 German municipalities, covering the period from 1989 to 2024. The dataset includes manifestos from established national parties (such as CDU/CSU, SPD, Greens, FDP, Left Party, and AfD), other parties, and independent local lists. It covers municipalities ranging from small towns to large cities and therefore allows researchers to examine how local political competition varies across different territorial contexts.
The data provided by GLMP include the original manifesto texts as machine-readable text files. Each document is accompanied by information that allows researchers to identify the municipality, election year, and political actor. In addition, the dataset will include information on local coalition agreements from municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants which currently collected and prepared for data release.
Future extensions of GLMP aim to expand the coverage of municipalities, elections, and political actors, further strengthening comparative research on local party politics and multi-level democracy in Germany.
Parts of the data collection have been funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) in the project „Independent Local Lists between Challenger and Mainstream Actors in Local Politics“ (Grant No: 534908387).