GERDA – German Election Database

The German Election Database provides a comprehensive dataset of local, state, and federal election results in Germany. The data is intended to facilitate research on electoral behavior, representation, and political responsiveness at multiple levels of government. All datasets include turnout and vote shares for all major parties. Moreover, we provide geographically harmonized datasets that account for changes in municipal boundaries and mail-in voting districts.

Download the Election Data

Read the Usage Notes

Read the Paper

Dataset Features

1. Municipal Elections

Coverage: Election results for all municipalities across Germany from 1990 to 2020.
Content: Turnout and vote shares for major national parties (SPD, CDU/CSU, FDP, Greens, Die Linke) and other parties such as AfD and Freie Wähler.

2. State Elections

Coverage: State election results at the municipal level for the period 2006–2019.
Content: Turnout and vote shares for major parties and additional parties such as AfD from 2012 onwards.

3. Federal Elections

Coverage: Federal election results at the municipal level since 1980 and county level since 1953, including the 2025 election.
Content: Turnout and vote shares for all parties that have contested elections, with special handling of mail-in votes.
Data Types: Raw data, unharmonized data, and harmonized data with different boundary versions.

Harmonization to 2021 Boundaries

We also provide all election results datasets in an adjusted format where we harmonize geographic entities (e.g. municipalities or counties) to 2021 boundaries.
For federal elections, we also provide the data for 2025 municipality boundaries. These are based on crosswalk files that we created ourselves based on official cross-sectional information on municipality reforms for the years 2021–2025.

Authors

Citation

Please cite the accompanying paper when using this dataset:

Heddesheimer, Vincent, Hanno Hilbig, Florian Sichart, & Andreas Wiedemann. 2025. GERDA: German Election Database. Nature: Scientific Data, 12: 618.

@article{Heddesheimer2025GERDA,
   author = {Vincent Heddesheimer and Hanno Hilbig and Florian Sichart and Andreas Wiedemann},
   doi = {10.1038/s41597-025-04811-5},
   issn = {2052-4463},
   issue = {1},
   journal = {Scientific Data},
   month = {4},
   pages = {618},
   title = {GERDA: The German Election Database},
   volume = {12},
   url = {https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-04811-5},
   year = {2025}
}

Work in progress

The database is work in progress. If you have any suggestions, comments, or issues, please feel free to email us or to file an issue.