Voter Turnouts

Analyzing possible causes for declining voter turnout in Germany
Voter Turnouts project header image

By Jan Kühn, October 2022

For decades, Germany had very high voter turnouts of up to 91% (1972) in its federal elections (Bundestagswahlen). But since 1987 and with some ups and downs, numbers have declined significantly to around 77% in the latest elections in 2021. In elections in federal states (Bundesländer) and on the local level (Kommunalwahlen) these numbers have been even far lower at times.

There is a lot of data available to search for possible causes of the decline in voter turnout. This project tries to find and visualize a small part of them.

The main data source is the "Bundeswahlleiter", the federal authority regarding elections in Germany. It publishes detailed election results by constituency (Wahlkreis) and also socio-economic data for all constituencies.

  • The code (in a Jupyter Notebook) can be found on GitHub
Project Voter Turnouts example - Absolute voter numbers
Project Voter Turnouts example - Voter Turnouts over the years
Project Voter Turnouts example - Voter Turnouts in East and West Germany
Project Voter Turnouts example - Correlations
Project Voter Turnouts example - Unemployment and Voter Turnout
Project Voter Turnouts example - Income and Voter Turnout
Project Voter Turnouts example - Subplots
Project Voter Turnouts example - Bivariate map