Women and Parties in German Assemblies (WaP)

The project “The Electoral Success of Women across Different Levels of Government” funded by the Fritz-Thyssen-Stiftung investigated the patterns of women’s representation in elected institutions in Germany across the four levels of government. In order to perform this comparison, the central undertaking of the project was to collect the vast amount of records mapping the representation of women in local and district assemblies from various sources, and organize these figures in a format that allows systematic analyses. Having completed this task, the project’s dataset - The Women and Parties in German Assemblies Data (WaP) - comprises information on the study’s dependent variable, the gender and political party composition of elected assemblies during the 2000s, as well as additional contextual information for all the units of analyses.

1. Administrative variables:
year; year in which the last election has been held; year in which the next election will be hold; exact date of election; federal state (Land); entity (name of the Bund, the federal state, the district or the municipality); population density in year 2003; level of administrative classification; Regionalschlüssel (identification number of the entitiy) ; Gemeindeschlüssel (identification number of the city); Kreis/City; number of districts / Kreise belonging to a federal state; Nomenclature des unités territoriales statistiques (NUTS1) on the level of federal states, and NUTS 3 on the level of districts; entity belongs to former German Democratic Republic; large city over 300.000 inhabitants.

2. Legislative variables:
total number of seats in the council / Rat; log of total seats in legislature; total number of seats held by women in the council / Rat; percentage of women represented in the council / Rat; percent seats held by Left wing parties (SPD, PDS, Linke, Grüne); percent seats held by minor parties; presence of women; percent women in Bund only (in Land only, in Kreis only, in Gemeinde only); total number and percentage of seats held by SPD (FDP, Linke, Grüne, CDU, Voting blocs, other parties); number of SPD (FDP, Linke, Grüne, CDU, Voting blocs, other parties) seats and percentage of SPD (FDP, Linke, Grüne, CDU, Voting blocs, other parties) seats held by women.

3. Party vote variables:
total number of votes and percent of votes for SPD, CDU/CSU, Grüne, FDP, Linke, Voting blocs (Wählergruppen), other parties; total number of votes; Gallagher index; voting system; voting list (closed, open, restrictively open, inferior candidates).

4. Sociodemographic variables:
area of entity in km²; number of inhabitants per km²; number of inhabitants per km² for all levels, mostly for 2003; total number of inhabitants; total number of female inhabitants; total number of foreigners; percentage of foreigners; total number of female foreigners; percentage of female foreigners (amongst all foreigners); absolute number of employees (only employees paying mandatory social security contributions); absolute number of female employees; percentage of female employees; unemployment rate; total number of employees in primary sector; percentage of employees in primary sector; total number of female employees in primary sector; percentage of female employees in primary sector; total revenue of the entity (in Mio. €); revenue of the entity by taxes; total expenditures of the entity; expenditure of the entity on social security; entity experienced changes in administrative structure.