Empowering Children? Political Consequences of the Proxy Vote for Children

Abstract

In order to illuminate the consequences of extra votes for parents, this article looks at the questions as to whether parents differ in their party choice from younger people and what the overall results would have been like for German Bundestag elections 1994-2005. The results can be summarized as follows: (1) In simple comparisons, parents and the childless have not differed a lot in their party preferences since the first half of the 1990s. However, a more complex analysis of the 2005 elections brought to light systematic differences that are contingent on voters' age and on their region. (2) The aggregate results of the 1994 to 2005 elections would have looked very much the same. Thus, no party would profit per se in electoral terms from the introduction of the proxy vote for children.

Keywords: franchise, children, parents, Germany, elections, democratization