What Do Voters Think?

Lukas Haffert*, Pascal Langenbach**, and Tobias Rommel***
*University of Zurich, **MPI for Collective Goods Bonn, and ***Technical University of Munich

We present results from an online survey among German voters regarding their preferences for electoral reform proposals. We find that the majority of participants support a reform that reduces the size of the Bundestag, even if the trade-offs inherent in such a reform are made transparent to them. Among a set of three different reform proposals, reducing the number of electoral districts to 225 is most popular. Importantly, reducing the number of districts is more popular than the coalition parties’ proposal of not allocating surplus seats. Parallel voting, as proposed by the CDU/CSU, is the least popular reform proposal, even if it is still more popular than the status quo.

Please find detailed results in our scientific report. We have also published an extended version of our findings as an MPI working paper.