Constituency campaigns are im portant phenomena fo r students o f political parties, voting behaviour as well as p o litica l communication. These research communities perceive constituency campaigns as p a rts o f centralised high-tech campaigns aiming in strategic ways a t the efficient m obilisation o f voters. We propose in this paper an alternative understanding o f constituency campaigns using the case o f the German parliam entary elections in 2005 to em pirically test this understanding. We perceive constituency campaigns as phenom ena signalling a relative independence o f individual candidates fro m the national p a r ty cam paign. We label this phenomenon individualised campaigning. We argue th at individualised campaigning is driven among others by electoral incentives. W e test this hypothesis with regard to the German mixed-member electoral system and on the basis o f a survey o f all candidates standing fo r election in 2005. Two Different Perspectives on Constituency Campaigns Election campaigns are traditionally multilevel. One level is national and it is populated by political celebrities standing as front runners for their parties. Their primary means of communication are the mass media, political advertisements and large-scale political rallies. A second campaign level is local. It is mostly populated by quite average citizens running on a party list or for a direct mandate in a local constituency. They meet their potential voters face-to-face on m arket squares, through visits to companies, at social events, or simply through knocking on their front doors. This paper is about the relationship between these two levels in the German parliamentary election o f 2005 and on the way the country's mixed-member voting system patterns this relationship.

Political representation in European democracies is widely considered partisan and collectivist. This article, however, stresses that there is more to the representative process in European democracies than just its textbook version. It emphasizes the role of geographic representation as a complementary strategy in party‐dominated legislatures that is characterized by two distinct features. First, legislators employ distinct opportunities to participate in legislative contexts to signal attention to geographic constituents without disrupting party unity. Second, these activities are motivated by individual‐ and district‐level characteristics that supplement electoral‐system‐level sources of geographic representation. We empirically test and corroborate this argument for the German case on the basis of a content analysis of parliamentary questions in the 17th German Bundestag (2009–13). In this analysis, we show that higher levels of localness among legislators and higher levels of electoral volatility in districts result in increased geographic representation.

The Internet is changing the technological context of election campaigns in dramatic ways. The question of the larger impact of this development on the structures and strategies of election campaigns has stimulated two competing hypotheses. The orthodox view perceives the new medium as facilitating centralized election campaigns that allow party headquarters to target and mobilize groups of voters in more efficient and direct ways. A revisionist view stresses the Internet as a means for individual constituency candidates running candidate-centered campaigns at the local level. From this perspective, the Internet has a decentralizing effect on the structure of election campaigns. This article tests both hypotheses on the basis of the German Candidate Study 2005. It looks in particular at the impact of the electoral context on the style of constituency candidates' online campaigns in the German Federal Elections of 2005.

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The assignment of seats to specialized standing committees is a most consequential choice in legislative contexts. Distributive theories of legislative organization suggest that electoral incentives to cultivate personal votes result in the self-selection of legislators to committees best suited to please their constituents and, thus, to secure reelection. However, these theories discard the partisan basis of European parliaments and therefore fail to adequately assess the politics of committee assignments in these particular contexts. This article aims to explore the significance of distributive theories for the German case in differentiated ways and on the basis of a new and rich data set including statistical data for five legislative terms (1983, 1987, 1998, 2005, and 2009). It argues that in partisan assemblies, political parties might develop an interest in distributive politics themselves and might assign distinct types of legislators to distinct committees to seek personal votes contingent upon distinct electoral incentives. Particularly, we argue that Germany’s mixed proportional system provides incentives to parties to assign legislators with profound local roots to district committees best suited to please geographic constituents.

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