German Voters Reward CDU/CSU Parliamentarians for Supporting Marriage for All

Voters in Germany rewarded members of the Bundestag from the conservative parties the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) who voted to make same-sex marriage legal. This is shown by a study on Germany’s 2017 federal election, which is published in ifo Schnelldienst on the fourth anniversary of “marriage for all.” “Our results show that the share of first, direct-candidate votes for MPs from the CDU and CSU who voted in favor of marriage for all was 1.29 percentage points higher than for CDU/CSU MPs who voted against it,” says Niklas Potrafke, co-author of the study and Director of the ifo Center for Public Finance and Political Economy. The eco-nomic situation in the voters’ local constituency played only a minor role in their assessment of the CDU/CSU candidates.

The study is based on the changes in first-vote shares for CDU/CSU politicians be-tween the 2013 and 2017 federal elections. Supporters of marriage for all lost fewer first votes than its opponents. Mean comparisons show that the first-vote share of supporters fell by 6.02 percentage points while that of opponents fell by 8.65 per-centage points.

“In our model, we take into account that other factors also influenced both the change in vote share and MPs’ voting behavior on marriage for all. These factors include the share of the vote won by the Alternative for Germany party (AfD), the unemployment rate, and the age or gender of the MPs,” Potrafke says. The change in the unemployment rate shows no effect on the change in the CDU/CSU’s share of first votes in the constituencies. “This suggests that how their MP voted on marriage for all played a bigger role for voters than economic development in their constitu-ency,” Potrafke says.

Four years ago, on June 30, 2017, a roll-call vote was held in the German Bundestag to introduce same-sex marriage (“marriage for all”). In the end, 393 MPs voted for and 226 against marriage for all; four MPs abstained and seven were not present for the vote. Among the CDU/CSU members, 225 voted against marriage for all while 75 voted in favor of it; four abstained and five were not present. Overall, the CDU/CSU’s share of first votes fell from 45.96 percent in the 2013 federal election to 38.03 per-cent in 2017.