1. Project Motivation and Relation to SCRIPTS

While the specific definition and nature of the Liberal Script is a matter of debate, it seems close to impossible imagining an iteration of such a script without collective selfdetermination ensured by democratic procedures. Adopting the Dahlian perspective on liberal democracy (Dahl 1971), the Liberal Script rests on a conception that emphasizes pluralism as well as collective procedures rooted in the political rights of individual citizens. First and foremost, this relates to free, fair, competitive, and wellorganized elections. Looking at the case of Berlin and the most significant occasion of electoral mismanagement in modern German history, the proposed project “Scaring away the young? Electoral maladministration in Berlin and its consequences” (SATY) investigates the potential negative effects of electoral integrity issues on the reproduction of the Liberal Script by conducting survey research on attitudes of young adults. Objectively, the integrity of elections in Germany can be considered a given: Since 2012, the quality of elections has been evaluated on a worldwide basis by the Electoral Integrity Project1 and the project attested the highest electoral integrity to the 2013 and 2017 Bundestag elections. Germany ranks 6th among 167 countries included in the study. Even the election with the highest index value (the Danish parliamentary election in 2015) was not much closer to the ideal of an election with absolute integrity in every respect, which is anyway hardly achievable in real-world settings (Norris et al. 2018; Norris & Grömping 2019). Nevertheless, these objectively high values do not automatically translate into similarly high values at the level of citizens’ perceptions. In fact, in one of the first analyses of subjectively perceived electoral integrity available for Germany, Schmitt-Beck and Faas (2021) were able to show that there is considerable variance at the individual level. According to the results of their study, only 35 percent of respondents expressed no doubts that the 2017 Bundestag election had been “completely free and fair“. In contrast, one in four voters had substantial doubts about the procedural quality of the 2017 election. Moreover, they show that perceptions of electoral integrity are closely related to political alienation and especially to perceptions of democracy in general. Public debates in Germany and elsewhere have also tied electoral integrity to the practice of absentee voting, which is exercised by an increasing number of German voters. At first glance, there is no direct link between these issues, but there is an indirect one: Populist actors regularly put forward accusations that absentee voting facilitates systematic electoral fraud, even though they fail to produce empirical evidence to support such claims. Discernibly, such accusations constitute a political strategy of fomenting doubt on the trustworthiness of electoral institutions. Respective instances can be observed in Germany, specifically on the part of the AfD, and internationally, where Donald Trump in the US and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil are prominent examples. The explanations of and narratives surrounding electoral integrity presented so far share an understanding that shortcomings in electoral integrity are the result of powerand party-motivated distortions of election outcomes and results, i.e., manipulation. However, the range of possible impairments to electoral integrity (Norris 2013, 2014) go far beyond this, ranging from extreme manifestations in the form of violence and fundamental violations of human rights in the context of elections to ”mundane issues of maladministration, lack of technical capacity, or human error which undermine the integrity of the electoral process“ (Norris 2013: 566). While violence and massive human rights valuations are fortunately rare in liberal societies, accusations of both manipulation as well as maladministration are regularly put forward by contestants of the Liberal Script – regardless of whether there is empirical evidence or not – catering to dissatisfied citizens. In other words, since elections are a crucial element of the Liberal Script, their actual malfunctioning or continuous undermining of electoral integrity constitutes a major challenge. From this perspective, the upcoming repeat election in Berlin is of unique interest to scientific investigation. After an unprecedented degree of maladministration during the simultaneous elections for the local, state and federal legislatures in 2021, a court decision has now mandated a repetition at least for the local and state election. This presents a unique situation in which we want to investigate the effects of electoral maladministration on perceived electoral integrity and their consequences on democratic attitudes. One group is of particular interest to us as well as the future of the Liberal Script: young adults. In various subfields of electoral research, it is a well-established finding that first election experiences are especially formative and produce habitualized patterns of future behavior (e.g., Franklin 2004). Those who learn during their first electoral experiences that it is “proper“ to participate in elections when they take place (i.e., internalize an electoral norm) are very likely to become lifelong voters; voting for a party at a young age can lead to the formation of a matching party identification. If we transfer these habit-related considerations to the question of the perceived integrity of elections, we can ask whether young and/or first-time voters’ experiences of mismanagement lead to a particularly lasting influence on their trust in the electoral process or their support of the liberal model of democracy. Because the Liberal Script must reproduce itself by, among other things, experience and socialization, negative events like the one under investigation here have the potential to harm the Liberal Script by way of fostering short- as well as long-term contestations. To what extent and for whom that is the case is precisely the focus of our proposed project.

2. Case Description and Expectations

In the German context, maladministration of elections has been observed at most sporadically and only in small, local contexts. This has changed massively, however, with Election Day in Berlin on September 26, 2021: The Berlin Constitutional Court, which is responsible for reviewing the procedural correctness of elections in Berlin, declared both the election of the “Abgeordnetenhaus” (the state parliament) as well as the elections to the district councils (“Bezirksverordnetenversammlungen”) – i.e., Berlin’s local elections – to be null and void; both elections must therefore be repeated on February 12, 2023. In its ruling on November 16, the court recognized how farreaching this ruling is, but still summarizes ultimately: “Nevertheless, even taking into account the requirement of the least possible interference, it is alone suitable, necessary and appropriate, because of the frequency and severity of the electoral errors, to ensure a composition of the state parliament and the district councils that meets the legal requirements for democratic elections” (Verfassungsgerichtshof 2022: 32/33, our translation). This verdict, however, was and is not without controversy. Within the court, the decision was not taken unanimously, but rather with 7 to 2 votes. In addition, the election review process with respect to the (Berlin) Bundestag elections is procedurally very different with the Bundestag itself being in charge (in the first place) rather than a court. In fact, the Committee for the Scrutiny of Elections of the German Bundestag came to a very different conclusion and recommended to have the elections repeated in only 431 of the 2,500 Berlin electoral districts, but by no means Berlin-wide – a recommendation that was ultimately adopted by the plenum of the German Bundestag. Again, however, this decision was controversial, with only SPD, Greens and FDP voting in favor. The CDU/CSU and AfD have since announced that they will appeal this decision by the majority of the Bundestag to the Federal Constitutional Court. In sum, there is no doubt that the 2021 election was affected by severe issues of electoral maladministration. However, how massive they actually were and whether the appropriate remedy is a total, Berlin-wide re-election is controversial. After all, even though the Berlin Constitutional Court declared the entire election null and void, there are precise listings of specific polling stations that were severely affected by problems on Election Day, while other stations (as well as absentee voting) were not affected at all. These differential levels of objective affectedness are also the reason why the German Bundestag ultimately decided to have re-elections in “only“ 431 Berlin voting districts. In other words: Depending on their place of residence (and thus their polling station), Berlin citizens were affected to different extents by the events, but also by the election repetitions that are under way. As of today, only some voters (in the 431 selected voting districts) will be allowed to cast their votes again for the Bundestag elections, while all eligible Berliners are allowed to do so for the state and local elections. These differential levels of affectedness are – from a voters’ point of view – random, thus resembling a natural experiment that can be exploited to understand causal mechanisms in the linking of objective electoral maladministration and their subjective evaluations as well as consequences for democratic attitudes and behavior. Of course, subjective reactions cannot be expected to be uniform, but rather have to be understood in the context of individual predispositions, but also individual information behavior and individual levels of knowledge influence these perceptions. We want to exploit this unique opportunity for relevant democracy research while at the same time focusing on young people with the submitted project. Linking the arguments above to the specific case of the repeat election in Berlin, we can formulate three guiding expectations: (1) The necessity to conduct a repeat election due to maladministration has a negative effect on democratic attitudes (e.g., perceptions of electoral integrity or satisfaction with democracy). (2) While there might be some ceiling effects, these negative effects are stronger for already disenchanted citizens. (3) Finally, the effect is moderated by ‘winning or losing the election’ – meaning that changes in outcomes generate different effects for partisans of different parties.

3. Research Design

To study our main group of interest, namely young people, we can rely on a twofold database – a cross-sectional, but also a longitudinal one. Both of them can also be combined with the natural-experimental setting described above, as we can precisely locate our respondents within Berlin based on their place of residence. To study Berlin elections in a longitudinal perspective, we can make use of data collected in a previous project. Thorsten Faas, together with Arndt Leininger (TU Chemnitz), conducted a survey of around 5,000 young Berliners (aged between 15 and 20) in the aftermath of the 2021 elections. Many of them gave the researchers the permission to invite them back for future interviews. The survey already included questions on electoral integrity, trust in institutions as well as attitudes towards democracy. Hence, it is well suited for the research questions at stake here, as it allows us to investigate whether these attitudes have changed in response to the processes surrounding elections in Berlin. The 2021 survey was conducted as a Push2Web survey: 28,000 letters were sent to young Berliners aged 15 to 20, whose primary residence was in Berlin; the postal addresses were randomly selected from the population register by the State Office for Civil and Regulatory Affairs and made available to researchers. A one-time invitation letter with a personalized access code for an online survey was sent to these addresses. Since we have the postal addresses, we can also locate the individuals in the Berlin constituencies and thus assign whether and to what extent they were affected by the problems of Election Day 2021 in Berlin. Ultimately, 5,105 young Berliners took part in our survey, which corresponds to a response rate of 18.2 percent. About 80 per cent of these provided us with an email address and permission to contact them again. Re-interviewing these respondents will allow us to track changes over time, especially testing for interaction effects with the personal affectedness by the 2021 events and their consequences. In addition to this, we would like to set up a new survey following the same logic that Faas and Leininger have applied in 2021. We would therefore ask the State Office for Civil and Regulatory Affairs for 30,000 randomly selected postal addresses of young people distributed all over Berlin. We expect that this will yield another 5,000 interviews, which will allow for in-depth analysis and representative analyses of the 2023 election, again especially for interaction effects with the personal affectedness by the 2021 events and their consequences. To these addresses, we would then send an invitation letter with a personalized access link to an online survey. To further embed our study, we plan to include two additional groups of reference in our study: To understand whether young people react in a specific, possibly more pronounced way to the electoral proceedings than older voters, we need comparative measures for the general population. Hence, we will ask the State Office for Civil and Regulatory Affairs for randomly selected postal addresses of “non-young people” distributed all over Berlin, albeit with a smaller sample, namely 20.000 addresses. Furthermore, we can include an “outside” perspective, which will allow us to even better understand the role that being personally affected rather than being a bystander plays for perceptions of elections, electoral integrity, and democracy. We can again make use of the 2021 project by Faas and Leininger: Parallel to their 2021 Berlin study, they had also interviewed young people in Brandenburg. We will also re-interview them in our proposed project here, providing a comparative perspective from close by, but nevertheless ”from the outside”. In sum, this approach will allow us to compare young adults in Berlin over time, to the general Berlin public, and to young adults outside of Berlin while at the same time when investigating potential effects of (changing) electoral outcomes and being affected by the decision to hold a repeat election. Consequently, this enables us to test causal claims and to produce findings highly relevant for the effects of issue of electoral integrity on democratic attitudes.