Research Design
This chapter prepares the empirical analysis by developing a research strategy for capturing the hard-to-grasp selection of immigrant origin candidates. Drawing on candidate survey data from four German elections and qualitative interviews, it discusses t
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Research Design
The previous chapters have illustrated the variety of behavioral patterns that political parties might show in the selection of IO candidates. The next question concerns how to access party selection behavior toward IO candidates from an empirical angle. The research that is required for looking into party selection behavior is data intensive and entails collecting information that is not easily accessible. I have therefore developed a research design which attempts to take a rare look at how party selectorates treat IO candidates in their selection procedures. In the following, I will first discuss the case selection, before outlining the empirical approach taken in the subsequent analysis and describing the types of data I will use. This will be concluded with a description of the operationalization of the central dependent and independent variables.
6.1 Why Germany? One difficulty that plagues researchers of minority representation is the small number of observations available (Bloemraad 2013). A small number of cases and a lack of data on the immigrant origins of parliamentary candidates and legislators are the main obstacles preventing researchers from studying minority representation more thoroughly. Owing to its federal structure, the German political system provides fertile ground for overcoming this problem. Germany’s federalism makes party organizations important actors both at state and national level and allows for the study of the presence of IO candidates at both levels simultaneously. By pooling candidate data from national and state levels, I can therefore achieve a sample size of IO candidates which allows me to explore how political parties treat IO candidates in their selection processes. The present study accordingly suggests a pragmatic but reasonable
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 S. Ceyhan, How German Parties Select Candidates of Immigrant Origin, Springer Series in Electoral Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59451-0_6
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6 Research Design
approach to increasing the number of IO candidates and contributing to filling the research gap on party selection behavior toward IO candidates. However, combining candidate data from national and state levels is only legitimate if both candidate groups are sufficiently similar, meaning they do not differ systematically in their biographical and political backgrounds. We have to be sure that the requirements for becoming a parliamentary candidate correspond at both levels. In the following, I will therefore present arguments for assuming that pooling candidate data from national and state levels is indeed legitimate—the arguments derive from the research strand on political careers. Although legislators can of course freely switch from the state to the national level and vice versa, their career trajectories do not move in random directions. In the wake of Schlesinger’s (1966) work on US Congressmen, most scholars conceived state legislat
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