My research focuses on non-democratic politics, with particular attention to public support for repression and political violence. In my dissertation project, which is supervised by Felix Haass, I examine the effects of authoritarian crime crackdowns on public safety, voters’ behavior, and democratic backsliding. Methodologically, I rely on (quasi-)experimental methods, geospatial analysis, and remote sensing.
This research note introduces StatePol, a new and comprehensive database of German state politicians in parliaments and governments. StatePol includes sociodemographic characteristics such as age, sex, and birthplace, as well as career data such as memberships and offices in parliamentary party groups, committees, parliamentary presidencies, and government cabinets for every parliamentary and cabinet member on the German state level. The added value of the database lies in the fact that it offers highly fine-grained data capturing day-by-day changes within legislative periods. As a result, StatePol contains a total of 22,379,186 daily observations of 6946 individual decision-makers in the German federal states, including information on their positions and mandates in legislative and executive realms. We illustrate potential applications of StatePol by exploring the descriptive representation of sex, age, and regional origin (eastern/western Germany) in the German states. We find that the proportion of women in the state parliaments has stagnated at around 30% since the early 2000s, with considerable differences between parties and their parliamentary groups. We also observe a steady increase in the average age of the members of parliament, particularly among those of the Greens and the Left. While politicians of East German origin dominate in the parliaments and governments of the East German states, they are less represented in West German state parliaments and governments. In contrast, decision-makers born in West Germany consistently make up a substantial proportion of all state cabinet members. The database is publicly available, allowing researchers to comprehensively examine various questions on representation in the German context. This research note is accompanied by a homepage allowing users to explore the full potential of StatePol and to download the data.
@article{koch_statepol_2024,title={{StatePol} – A Database on the Members of German State Cabinets and Parliaments},url={https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11615-024-00528-z},doi={10.1007/s11615-024-00528-z},journaltitle={Politische Vierteljahresschrift},shortjournal={Polit Vierteljahresschr},author={Koch, Elias and Kuhlen, Daniel and Mueller, Jochen and Stecker, Christian},date={2024-02-06},type={article},data={https://statepol.github.io/Database/},year={2024},volume={65},pages={759--783},note={<i>German Political Science Quarterly (PVS)</i>},}
