Update Log

This page tracks major updates to the German Election Database datasets.

2026-04-19

State elections: state_unharm, state_harm

  • Fixed turnout >100% caused by unallocated Briefwahl (mail-in) votes in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (1994–2011) and Schleswig-Holstein (2017/2022). Briefwahl votes are now properly allocated to municipalities using Amt-level or Kreis-level mappings from the Gemeindeverzeichnis.
  • Improved Brandenburg 1994 OCR extraction with arithmetic validation and self-correction.
  • Fixed eligible_voters incorrectly showing 0 instead of NA for Bavaria 1994–2013 (source data lacks turnout information for these years).
  • Added turnout safety flags (flag_harm_turnout_above_1) and caps in harmonized data.

2026-04-19

Python package: initial release of gerda on PyPI — lightweight Python loader for GERDA datasets. Source at hhilbig/gerda-py. Mirrors load_gerda_web, gerda_data_list, and party_crosswalk from the R package; covariate / Census merge helpers not yet ported.

2026-04-10

State elections: state_unharm, state_harm

  • Fixed Hamburg 2020: replaced Wahlkreislistenstimmen with Landesstimmen (state-wide list votes), consistent with all other Hamburg elections.

2026-04-02

Major update: County elections, European elections, mayoral elections, Meinungsbild, state election rewrite

  • New: Mayoral Elections – Election-level and candidate-level data for 7 states (Bayern, Niedersachsen, NRW, Rheinland-Pfalz, Saarland, Sachsen, Schleswig-Holstein), 1945–2025. Includes mayor panel data tracking individual mayors across terms with unique person IDs. Candidate data includes predicted gender and name-based migration background classification.
  • New: County Elections (Kreistagswahlen) – Municipality and county-level data, harmonized to 2021 boundaries.
  • New: European Elections – European Parliament election results (2009, 2014, 2019, 2024) at municipality level, harmonized to 2021 boundaries.
  • New: Meinungsbild – Subnational public opinion estimates for 43 policy issues using MRP (Multilevel Regression and Poststratification), covering states, electoral districts, and counties. Based on ~118,000 survey responses from GLES and ALLBUS.
  • State elections rewrite – Ground-up pipeline rewrite adding 34 new elections across all 16 states (2006–2024). Three harmonization versions now available: 2021, 2023, and 2025 boundaries. Fixed BaWü/RLP inconsistencies, added 4 missing 2020–2021 elections (BW, SA, BE, MV).
  • Corrected Schleswig-Holstein municipal election data.
  • Various data pipeline improvements, sanity checks, and documentation updates.

2025-11-28

Municipality elections: municipal_unharm, municipal_harm

  • Corrected issues in Schleswig-Holstein 1998 and Rhineland-Palatinate 1999 municipal election data

2025-11-21

State elections: state_unharm, state_harm

  • Added state election data to include state elections in 2022 (Niedersachsen) and 2023 (Bavaria and Hessen)

2025-11-20

Federal elections: federal_muni_raw, federal_muni_unharm, federal_muni_harm

  • Resolved issue in harmonized federal election data at municipality level where some municipalities entered with 0 vote shares for 2021 or 2025 depending on the dataset

2025-10-09

Covariate panel data: ags_area_pop_emp_2023

  • Updated covariate panel data to period 1990-2023

2025-07-31

Federal elections: federal_cty_unharm, federal_cty_harm

  • Removed minor error: Berlin was sometimes duplicated due to two different county ags. Now aggregated to one ags for Berlin for each election year

2025-05-20

Federal elections

  • Updated federal election datasets to include 2025 elections
  • Create two versions of the harmonized panel:
    • 2021 borders: All elections (1990-2025) mapped to 2021 municipality boundaries
    • 2025 borders: All elections (1990-2025) mapped to 2025 municipality boundaries
  • Created our own crosswalks based on official crosswalking data from the BBSR

2025-04-22

Federal and state elections

  • Added election dates for federal and state elections based on election type and date combinations

2025-04-14

Publication of database on Nature: Scientific Data