Data Spotlight #7
As dedicated data curators, we’re excited to showcase curated data collections that will hopefully ignite your research interests. Today we present you:
Thematic Data Collection on Elections and Political Attitudes
With the Bundestag elections on 23rd February 2025, there is a great deal of interest in public opinion and election data. GESIS caters to the needs of the scientific community by offering a comprehensive database on German federal and state elections and surveys between elections.
Since the surveys date back to 1949 at the federal level and to the early 1960s for the state level, data from GESIS’ topical collection “Elections and Political Attitudes” enable analyses of political attitudes, voting intentions, and important issues at the time of a single election as well as over time.
The collection includes data from long-running academic studies such as the German Longitudinal Election Study (GLES), as well as ongoing media surveys such as the Politbarometer, Forsa-Bus, and DeutschlandTrend series. Many of the studies on state parliament elections are provided by the Forschungsgruppe Wahlen. For the 2025 German federal election, the GLES collects cross-sectional and panel survey data in different survey modes and from voters as well as candidates. We also offer access to surveys commissioned by the Press and Information Office of the Federal Government.
Given the increasing importance of social media in political campaigns, we have also curated a complementary data collection on “Elections and Social Media“. The data are an important source for electoral and democracy research and for the study of changes in political and social attitudes in German society.
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