[Advocacy Advisors] German national parliament election questionnaire

Wed Sep 11 17:22:58 UTC 2013

2013/9/11 Luis Villa <lvilla at wikimedia.org>:
> Thanks for sharing, Mathias. Question about this process: do the parties
> tend to answer *all* of these?

Wahlprüfsteine are a common and accepted format of political
interaction between organisations and parties. Many organisations do
not send Wahlprüfsteine to each and every party but only a selection
of them, usually those parties which have some chance of passing the
5% threshold in the election. We decided in 2010 to send questions to
all parties who passed the procedural and formal requirements to be
listed on the ballot (they differ from state to state but usually
consist of a certain number of support signatures from eligible
voters).

To give you some perspective: The reply we got from the Social
Democrats was a file named "WPS-567.pdf". WPS stands for
Wahlprüfsteine and there is evidence that 567 is a running number
indicating the amount of answered Wahlprüfstein questionnaires so far.
It would be a fair assumption that larger parties can receive up to
1000 Wahlprüfsteine from individual groups for high profile elections
on the federal level. The amount of Wahlprüfsteine sent for state
elections (there will be one in Bavaria next Sunday and Hesse on 22
Sep) is dramatically lower.

Usually we either get a reply with answers to all question or we get a
(usually) polite response from single-issue parties (in this case:
Pensioners Party, the Non-voter Party, the Feminist Party) that they
do not feel the need or the capability to answer them. In previous
elections, several parties did not reply to questions individually but
a letter with a reply that usually broadly touched the issues without
actually answering any question. Something like "We consider copyright
an important issue."

> Or does the organization/movement have to
> have a particularly high profile to get their questions answered?

We know from direct conversations with members of larger parties that
the level of dedication in answering questions depends on the
perceived importance of the organisation asking those questions.
Smaller groups will still get an answer, maybe not as verbose as is a
large group.

In some cases, a question will actually trigger a party-internal
process of forming an opinion. We aware of one case in which a
question we asked about non-commercial clauses contributed to an
internal discussion process in the party that later decided against
advocating -nc licenses for certain works.

And really large groups will have more effective tools then
questionnaires to push their agenda :)

Mathias