Roll-Call Votes in the German Bundestag: A New Dataset, 1949–2013

Abstract

This letter introduces and describes new datasets that include all roll call votes (RCVs) taken in the German Bundestag from 1949 to 2013 as well as crucial contextual data on characteristics of the voting members of the Bundestag (MPs) and the RCVs taken. The data cover almost 2,000 RCVs, more than 3,500 MPs, and about 1,100,000 individual voting decisions. The data make the German case accessible for comparative roll call analysis and allow systematic longitudinal analyses of various research questions regarding legislative behavior in the Bundestag, some of which we briefly discuss in the concluding section.

When Do Men Represent Women’s Interests in Parliament? How the Presence of Women in Parliament Affects the Legislative Behavior of Male Politicians

“…The main explanatory variable is the respective proportion of women in the PPG in a single legislative period. Information on the number of female and male legislators in the factions of the Bundestag is taken from the Bundestag Roll Call Vote Data Set (BTVote, Sieberer et al , see Table in the Online Appendix).…”

“…The MP’s age (in years) is added to the model because older legislators tend to have more conservative attitudes towards gender equality (Kokkonen and Wängnerud ). Data for these variables stem from the BTVote dataset (Sieberer et al ).…”

Mandate type, electoral safety, and defections from the party line: The conditional mandate divide in the German Bundestag, 1949–2013

“…In the subsequent models that pool observations across LPs, we also include the government status of an MP’s party (as government MPs are often assumed to have stronger incentives to follow the party line), his or her gender, his or her seniority measured as years since first elected to the Bundestag (both as linear and squared terms to capture a possibly curvilinear effect), a dummy variable identifying incumbent MPs (because newcomers may be more likely to defect), the number of roll call votes taken during the respective LP, the seat share of the government parties (because narrow margins make defection more costly), and fixed effects for electoral periods that capture time-specific variation in defection that cannot be ascribed to the systematic variables in the model. All variables are taken or constructed from the BTVote data sets (Sieberer et al, 2020).…”

Does a District-Vote Matter for the Behavior of Politicians? A Textual Analysis of Parliamentary Speeches

“…An additional contribution is that we analyze parliamentary speeches in Germany. These can serve to inform about MP's actions in committees behind closed doors and inform about MP-behavior in non roll-call votes, which constitute the majority of all votes in the German Parliament (Sieberer et al, 2018). The use of speeches also addresses the concern that roll-call votes are a selected sample of votes (Carrubba et al, 2008).…”