German Internet Panel, Wave 29 (May 2017)

The German Internet Panel (GIP) is an infrastructure project. The GIP serves to collect data on individual attitudes and preferences that are relevant to political and economic decision-making processes.

The questionnaire contains numerous experimental variations in the survey instruments as well as a cross-questionnaire experiment. For more information, see the study documentation.

Topics: Opinion on a reform of the health system; support for various measures to finance health care; preference for a general practitioner model or free choice of doctor; opinion on a reform of social security for the unemployed; conditions for receiving unemployment benefit II (Hartz IV); Preferred extent of rules for the German labour market; opinion on reform of the pension system; most and least preferential proposals on the financing of statutory pensions; opinion on reform of the education system; preferential level of expenditure on education; the most important area of education, for which the Federal Government should spend more money and education, for which less money should be spent in particular; opinion on a reform of the tax system; demand for state measures to reduce income disparities; opinion on tax justice; opinion on reforms of the labour market and social security systems in the member states of the euro zone; preference for more or less EU decision-making powers with regard to these reforms; policy areas in which the European Union should have more or less decision-making power than it does at present; policy areas in which services should most likely be developed and dismantled.

Perception of the parties CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Bündnis90/Die Grünen, Die Linke, AfD as contentious or closed; assessment of the size ratio of parties within a hypothetical government coalition (share of members of the Bundestag in percent); expectation of how many ministers these parties will represent in the government (share of ministers in percent); party which, in such a hypothetical government coalition, will represent the Federal Chancellor of Germany; opinion on the diversity of political positions of the parties in a hypothetical government; assessment of the ability of the respective coalition parties to assert themselves in joint decisions in this hypothetical government.

Politics and society: characterisation of Germany and the EU as democratic; perception of climate change as a threat; preference for Germany´s EU membership; opinion on the legitimacy of a referendum on Germany´s EU membership; opinion on the possibilities of political influence in Germany and the EU; agreement to rent the citizens´ centre locally for events by selected parties, groups and religious communities.

Vignette experiments: (Split Sample)
a) Vignette experiment on political candidates with different characteristics of the attributes sex, age, education, religion and family background, with regard to the own political views and as political representatives at the federal level;
b) Vignette experiment on political candidates with different characteristics of the attributes sex, age, education, family background, main occupation, political experience, work place of the last five years, recently praised, criticised, mocked, political ideology, attitude to immigration, attitude to a referendum on EU membership with regard to personal vote decision at the national level (Bundestagswahl, Sonntagsfrage), and candidate who best represents the concerns of ordinary people.

Questions on the project ´Gesellschaft im Wandel´: sections of the website gesellschaft-im-wandel.de which have been visited since the last survey; frequency of reading the research results on the aforementioned website; importance of being informed about the research results; preferred source of information on research results on the project.

Demography (played variables): sex; year of birth (categorised); highest educational degree; highest professional qualification; marital status; number of household members (household size); employment status; federal state; year of recruitment; german citizenship; private internet usage.

Additionally coded was: unique ID, GIP, household ID, GIP; person ID within the household; interview date; current online status; allocation to the experimental groups; questionnaire evaluation (interesting, varied, relevant, long, difficult, too personal); assessment of the survey in total.