A voting advice application (VAA) or election compass is a Web application that helps voters find a candidate or a party that stands closest to their preferences.
We prepared a questionnaire for parties and individual candidates participating in the local elections to fill out ahead of election date. Questions ("statements") were assembled by Prof. Kersting's team at the University of Muenster Institute of Political Science. Positions were voluntarily sent in by parties and candidates upon our team's request. Depending on the degree of controversy and relevance to each district 30 out of 44* questions were selected to enter the respective Kommunalwahlcheck applications.
Note: Some parties and/or candidates refused to participate in this project or left out some questions, thus, the data may seem incomplete. We are, nontheless, quite happy with the rate of participation and the reach our applications had among voters.
*47 for Münster's runoff election on 27.09.20
In the Federal Republic of Germany each of the 16 federal states has authority over setting the rules for local, i.e. district, elections on its territory. North Rhine-Westphalia ("NRW") applies the model of the South German council constitution according to which city mayors (for urban districts) and district administrators (for rural districts) are not only the highest representatives of their respective municipalities and head of the district authority. They also preside over the city or district council, respectively. They are elected by direct ballot as individual candidates while the city or district council comprises of parties winning seats proportional to their share of the public vote. Individual candidates enter a runoff election if no one candidate reaches the 50%+1 threshold in the 1st round.
Read further (Federal Agency for Civic Education): https://www.bpb.de/nachschlagen/lexika/politiklexikon/17722/kommunalverfassungen
While elections were held in all districts of NRW this project is only concerned with the below-listed districts and election dates:
- Münster
- Bielefeld
- Essen
- Köln
- Siegen
Want to know more? Visit our
FAQ > (currently only available in German)
Read up on the election results (NRW elections administrator):
https://www.wahlergebnisse.nrw/kommunalwahlen/
| city | latest stable | date |
|---|---|---|
| README.md | - | 2020-09-29 15:35 |
| Münster | v3.3 | 2020-09-21 17:22 |
| Bielefeld | v3.1 | 2020-09-16 12:40 |
| Essen | v1.3b | 2020-09-07 12:50 |
| Köln | v3.2 | 2020-09-21 17:14 |
| Siegen | v1.3b | 2020-09-10 08:48 |
👏 Shout-out to the Open Election Compass project, we couldn't have done it without their dedicated coding!
GNU General Public License v3.0
Source code is available at
https://github.com/open-election-compass/client