Thomas Kleinhenz

Until the Bundestag elections of 1990 and 1994, nonvoting or abstention was
virtually unknown in the study of German elections. In both elections, more than 20
percent of the German electorate did not go to the polls. Although these record low
turnouts surprised many at the time, the origins of turnout decline in German
elections can be traced back to the early 1980s, when turnout in elections at the
federal, state, and local levels started to decrease at a steady rate.

Declining turnout rates can be observed in most West European countries.
However, Germany is a special and particularly interesting case of rising abstention
rates. For many years, West German voters were among the most active participants
in elections held in the Western world. In fact, turnout had increased to 90 percent
in national elections until the 1970s (up from 78.5 percent in the first federal
election of 1949), and to about 80 percent in state elections. Then, within two
elections' time ( 1983-1990), turnout dropped by 10 percentage points.
Subsequently, turnout in the first national elections of the united Germany--two
months after reunification in 1990--reached just 77.8 percent in the nation as a
whole and 78.6 percent in the former West Germany. Four years later, turnout
increased only slightly to 79.0 percent.

These developments raise a number of questions. Most fundamentally, they
include the following: Who are the nonvoters? Why did turnout decline? This
chapter constitutes an attempt to answer these and related questions.

Because turnout was high over much of the Federal Republic's existence,
nonvoting only recently became an issue for researchers interested in German
elections. In 1971 Kaack referred to the nonvoters as the "terra incognita of voting
behavior research." More than twenty years later, the conclusion would have been

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