Update Log

This page tracks major updates to the German Election Database datasets. Subscribe to the Atom feed to be notified of new entries.

2026-10-12

Municipal council elections: corrections.

  • Thüringen 2024: kreisfreie Städte added. Thüringen 2019 Die Linke, Brandenburg 2014 Greens and Berlin 2011 Piraten no longer counted as other.
  • New flag_majority_vote marks councils elected by majority vote (Thüringen, Rheinland-Pfalz).
  • Brandenburg freie_wahler now BVB / FREIE WÄHLER only; Aachen 2014 and 2020 corrected; voter counts corrected for Luckow 2024 and Strasburg (Uckermark) 2019.

2026-10-02

  • Hessen mayors 1993–2012 named (Hessami 2018, doi:10.7910/DVN/FZWOMK).
  • Candidate names corrected in NI, RP, BW, BY and MV.
  • Thüringen: party field fixed; losing candidates no longer named.
  • Hessen and Thüringen person_ids renumbered.

2026-09-28

Corrected council results; added far-right party columns.

  • Municipal: Sachsen-Anhalt 2024 now holds Gemeinderat results; Schleswig-Holstein before 2018 covers only kreisfreie Städte. New npd_heimat, freie_sachsen and iii_weg; ags_25 removed.
  • County: corrected Sachsen 2024 party columns.
  • New flags: flag_pooled (federal, European) and flag_postal_allocated (state).

2026-09-27

Added the Sachsen-Anhalt and Rheinland-Pfalz 2026 Landtagswahlen and Brandenburg Landrat elections from 2010.

  • Harmonized state files merge pdh, freiewaehler, tier_schutz_partei and volt_hamburg into die_humanisten, freie_wahler, tierschutz and volt; pop_density_ags in state_harm_25 is now per km².
  • European shares are now shares of valid_votes, including Niedersachsen postal votes counted at Samtgemeinde level. wkr_nr is zero-padded to one width per state.
  • New flags: flag_pooled (counted with a neighbour; own counts missing), flag_elected_by_council (Brandenburg Landrat chosen by the Kreistag; no winner), flag_wkr_changed_since_prev and flag_covars_carried_forward. Rows without reported votes now have missing shares.

2026-09-24

Historical state-election results updated.

  • Corrected NRW 1966/1970 vote counts and turnout.
  • Corrected SH 1983 in-person results; overall municipal turnout remains unavailable.
  • Added BW 1952 on 1979 municipal boundaries; electorate and turnout remain unavailable.
  • Unknown invalid-vote counts remain missing. Usage notes clarify vote denominators and postal-vote coverage.

2026-09-17

Corrections to municipality harmonization.

  • Corrected state and mayoral results, restored missing municipality names, and revised Uder’s European-election weights.
  • Mayoral data now include flag_shared_ags for results whose source code represents distinct municipalities. CSV, RDS and Excel downloads have been refreshed.

2026-09-09

Excel downloads added for all tabular datasets on the download page.

  • Excel files preserve geographic codes as text and display vote shares as percentages. CSV and RDS remain available.
  • Downloads now specify the filename and extension. New English and German instructions explain how to import CSV files in Excel 2019.

2026-08-19

28 historical state elections added at constituency level; ltw_wkr_unharm now runs 1980–2026.

  • Added: Saarland 1980–2017 (nine elections), Berlin 1999–2011 and 2021, Baden-Württemberg 2001–2011, Bremen 2003–2011 and 2023, Bayern 2008 and 2013, Sachsen 2004 and 2009, Hessen 2009, Niedersachsen 2008, Schleswig-Holstein 2005. Coverage is now 103 elections; what is still missing and why is listed in the data repository’s docs/ltw_wkr_recoverability.md.
  • Eleven Baden-Württemberg 2001 constituencies sit on 2006 boundaries and carry flag_wkr_boundaries_recomputed = 1, like Hessen 2013.
  • Bremen 2003 and 2007 are the official preliminary results (no final Wahlbereich table was published). Berlin 2021 is the election as held; the 2023 repeat is a separate election year.

2026-08-18

Turnout corrected in four states, and Hessen 2013 and 2018 added at constituency level.

  • State elections at municipality level: turnout was understated in Sachsen-Anhalt 1990–2016, Sachsen 1990/1994/1999, Niedersachsen 2008–2022 and Brandenburg 2009 and 2019; party shares shift slightly too. Brandenburg 1990, 1994 and 1999 remain affected.
  • ltw_wkr_unharm now covers the Hessen Landtagswahlen of 2013 and 2018, both ballots, all 55 Wahlkreise.
  • New flag_wkr_boundaries_recomputed: 1 where the figures sit on a later election’s Wahlkreiseinteilung. Hessen 2013 only, except Frankfurt am Main I and IV.
  • Brandenburg and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern constituencies now carry names. wkr_name belongs to the election year, not the number, so join on (state, election_year, wkr_nr).

2026-08-10

Hessen mayors are now traceable across terms, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern reaches beyond the big cities.

  • mayor_panel follows Hessen mayors from term to term across the whole 1993–2026 series. Most carry a person_id but no name, because the source redacts them.
  • Mecklenburg-Vorpommern mayoral elections now include the amtsfreien Gemeinden of Landkreis Ludwigslust-Parchim, 2014–2023; five Landkreise are still outstanding. Parchim 2022 has no party for its candidates.
  • New flag_decisive_round_missing in mayoral_candidates: is_winner is NA for every candidate and the election contributes no mayor to mayor_panel. No rows currently carry it.

2026-08-04

Corrected winners and turnout across the mayoral, Landrat and county datasets, plus new coverage.

  • Winners changed in 104 Hessen runoff cycles and 8 Niedersachsen mayoral elections. Sachsen county valid_votes had held the invalid-ballot count, and Niedersachsen county turnout rises (2016: 54.9 % → 55.6 %).
  • New county elections: Sachsen 1994 and 1995, Thüringen 1994 and 1999, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern 1994–2011, Nordrhein-Westfalen 2025 — the first and last Kreis-level only. Niedersachsen Gemeinderatswahlen now start in 1981.
  • Brandenburg mayoral elections now start in 2010, hauptamtliche Bürgermeister and Oberbürgermeister only; 2010–2013 is incomplete and rows sit on today’s municipal boundaries. Also new: Niedersachsen runoffs 2014/2016/2019 (no vote counts for 2019) and the 2017 elections, Schleswig-Holstein 2026, Sachsen-Anhalt Landrat through 2026.
  • New flag_partial_coverage in the harmonised county files: counts describe only part of the 2021 unit, while turnout and vote shares stay valid.

2026-07-28

County elections: Rheinland-Pfalz added, Brandenburg restored.

  • Rheinland-Pfalz Kreistagswahlen 1964–2019 are new, and Gemeinderatswahlen now start in 1969 rather than 1994, with council seats back to 1984. valid_votes counts ballots, and Gemeinden electing by Mehrheitswahl carry other = 1 instead of party shares. The 2024 Kommunalwahl is not yet included.
  • Brandenburg county elections 2003–2024, previously missing entirely, are now included, with pooled postal votes allocated to municipalities.

2026-07-27

Bayern councils 2026 · Hessen mayoral history · gerda 0.8.

  • Bayern Gemeinde- and Stadtratswahlen 2026, all 2,056 Gemeinden, with council seats. For 2026 valid_votes counts ballots rather than cumulative votes; shares are unaffected.
  • Hessen mayoral and Landrat elections now cover 1993–2026. The office redacts candidate names; they appear only where our other sources supply them.
  • gerda 0.8: share_50to59_census22 and share_60plus_census22 renamed to match their actual bins (old names now error), deprecated federal_cty_unharm aliases removed. No dataset values changed.

2026-07-23

Council seats (Sitze) added. seats_* columns in municipal_unharm wherever states report them (NA means no source; major parties only, so seats do not sum to council size), and a new county_council_seats dataset covering 400 counties, 2008–2025. Also new: Bayern Kommunalwahl 2026 in county_elec_unharm.

2026-07-21

Mayoral elections expanded from 7 to 13 states, adding Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Thüringen, Baden-Württemberg, Brandenburg, Sachsen-Anhalt and Hessen; Landrat elections now cover 11 states.

  • New flag_superseded marks Bayern rounds that did not seat a mayor — filter == FALSE for decisive rounds only.
  • Baden-Württemberg records no candidate party; Thüringen and Sachsen-Anhalt restrict candidate names.

2026-07-15

Wahlkreis-level election data, plus gerda 0.7.x. New datasets: Bundestag results for all 299 Wahlkreise (2002–2025, first and second votes, Direktmandat winners) and Landtag elections at Wahlkreis level (1990–2026, all 16 states). The R package gains download retries and on-disk caching (cache = TRUE).

2026-06-27

Baden-Württemberg state & county elections, and Hessen 2026 council elections.

  • BW Landtagswahl 2026 (the first under the new two-vote system — GERDA records the Zweitstimme) and BW Kreistagswahl 2024 (the source reports no turnout fields).
  • BW Kreistag 2004–2019: waehlervereinigungen is now filled, so party shares sum to ~1.0. Named-party shares are unchanged.
  • Hessen councils 2026, municipal and county, with BSW as its own column. Hessen council votes are cumulative, so valid_votes counts votes rather than ballots.

2026-05-06

Mayoral elections: election-type classification refined for NRW, Bayern and Saarland; 2025 NRW Stichwahl results added.

New: Landrat elections — landrat_unharm, landrat_candidates. Directly elected heads of Landkreise, 1945–2026, 9 states, split out of the mayoral datasets.

2026-04-19

State elections: state_unharm, state_harm

  • Fixed turnout above 100% caused by unallocated Briefwahl votes in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (1994–2011) and Schleswig-Holstein (2017/2022).
  • eligible_voters for Bayern 1994–2013 is now NA rather than 0 (the source has no turnout data for those years).
  • Added turnout safety flags (flag_harm_turnout_above_1) in harmonized data.

2026-04-19

Python package: initial release of gerda on PyPI, a lightweight loader for GERDA datasets. Mirrors load_gerda_web, gerda_data_list and party_crosswalk from the R package; covariate and Census merge helpers are not yet ported.

2026-04-10

State elections: Hamburg 2020 now uses Landesstimmen instead of Wahlkreislistenstimmen, consistent with all other Hamburg elections.

2026-04-02

Four new datasets, and a state-election rewrite.

  • Mayoral elections — election-level and candidate-level data for 7 states, 1945–2025, plus a panel tracking individual mayors across terms.
  • County elections (Kreistagswahlen) — municipality and county level, harmonized to 2021 boundaries.
  • European elections — 2009–2024 at municipality level, harmonized to 2021 boundaries.
  • Meinungsbild — subnational opinion estimates for 43 policy issues via MRP, for states, electoral districts and counties.
  • State elections rewritten from the ground up: 34 additional elections (2006–2024) and harmonization to 2021, 2023 and 2025 boundaries.

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