Article | Open Access
Party Competition and Voter Attitudes in German Border Regions: Evidence From Local VAAs
| Views: | 35 | | | Downloads: | 18 |
Abstract: When studying questions of European democracy, research is still very much focused on national political actors. This can be partly explained by the fact that data on political parties’ positions toward Europe and citizens’ attitudes have been mainly collected at the national level, and because sample sizes at the regional or local levels are too small. However, political parties compete about issues related to Europe on different levels—and especially so in European border regions where the local level coincides even more strongly with the EU level. For the particular case of such inner-EU border regions, home to around one third of EU citizens, little is known about patterns of party competition and citizens’ specific demands and preferences. This study addresses this gap, using innovative data from the voting advice application VOTO, specifically designed for local elections held in Germany in 2024. Focusing on four German border regions—two on the Eastern and two on the Western border—it provides new insights into how European democracy works at the local level by examining political parties’ positions and citizens’ political preferences. In particular, the study investigates the extent to which border-specific features and party cues shape voters’ perspectives on cross-border cooperation and European integration. Our findings speak not only to insights from qualitative case studies, which tell us that citizens living in such border regions have specific preferences in terms of saliency and positions, but also to quantitative research studying Euroscepticism in European border regions.
Keywords: border regions; Europe; Germany; party competition; political attitudes; VAAs
Supplementary Files:
Published:
Issue:
Vol 14 (2026): Voting Advice Applications: Methodological Innovations, Behavioural Effects, and Research Perspectives (In Progress)
© Daniela Braun, Elisa Deiss‐Helbig, Theresa Gessler, Jochen Müller, Julia Wagner, and Georg Wenzelburger. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction of the work without further permission provided the original author(s) and source are credited.