The German Local Manifesto Project (GLMP) provides a systematically documented and reproducible corpus of local election manifestos and related political programmes from municipalities in Germany.
The corpus brings together political programmes from local elections across Germany and provides consistent metadata on municipalities, political actors, election years, document types, programme scope, and population.
GLMP provides the original source documents together with structured metadata and documentation. It does not provide substantive policy coding or predefined political classifications. Researchers can use the corpus to conduct their own analyses of local political competition, party programmes, and political change.
GLMP at a glance
The current GLMP release contains 2,313 unique documents associated with 2,323 documented programme uses. The corpus covers 248 municipalities, 316 political actors, and all 14 German federal states.
2,313
Unique documents
2,323
Document uses
248
Municipalities
316
Political actors
14
Federal states
1989-2024
Election years represented
[13 basic programmes are not assigned to an election year.]
What’s in the data?
GLMP contains local election manifestos as well as other municipal political programmes and basic programmes. Each document is accompanied by structured metadata that allows users to identify its municipality or other geographical scope, political actor, election year, document type, and programme scope.
- Municipalities: municipality name, federal state, 2024 population, and 2024 AGS
- Political actors: parties, local lists, and other political groups
- Election years: local election years represented in the corpus
- Document types: municipal election programmes, other municipal political programmes, and basic programmes
- Programme scope: municipality, county, county and municipalities, state, region, or higher-level scope
How the data are organised
GLMP distinguishes between documents and document uses. A document is a unique source text identified by its SHA-256 content hash. A document use records how that document is associated with a municipality, political actor, election year, or other observation in the corpus. This distinction allows the same programme to be associated with several municipalities without duplicating the underlying source document.
Population data
Population figures refer to the municipality associated with a document and use the 2024 municipality reference state. Population data are therefore not applicable to documents that are not associated with a municipality, such as basic programmes. These documents are not treated as missing population data.
The Browse & Download tool allows users to define their own population range using minimum and maximum values. GLMP does not impose predefined municipality size classes.
Municipality identifiers
The Amtlicher Gemeindeschlüssel (AGS) is provided as a current municipality reference based on the municipality structure as of 31 December 2024. Historical AGS values are not reconstructed for earlier election years. The 2024 AGS therefore identifies municipalities consistently across the current GLMP corpus.
Explore the corpus
The Browse & Download tool provides the main entry point to the GLMP corpus. Users can filter the data by municipality, federal state, political actor, election year, population, document type, and programme scope, and download individual source documents or selected programmes.