The German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP): A new data source for studying local party politics

Abstract

Local politics remains comparatively understudied in political science, partly due to limited data on party competition at the municipal level. This research note introduces the German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP), a new dataset of German local election manifestos that expands the empirical infrastructure for studying programmatic competition in municipalities. The dataset contains 2307 manifestos from 306 political actors across 248 municipalities between 1989 and 2024, covering both national party branches and Independent Local Lists (ILL). Compared with existing collections of local manifestos, GLMP provides broader coverage of political actors and municipal contexts. The data allow scholars to analyze ideological positioning and policy priorities in local elections. An illustrative analysis demonstrates how the dataset can be used to compare ideological dispersion between ILL and national party branches. By providing large-scale manifesto data for German municipalities, GLMP opens new opportunities for research on local party competition and political representation.