Election campaign means promises. Posters, podiums, party events - politicians are canvassing for votes everywhere. But what happens afterwards? In March, Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate will elect new state parliaments. Before new promises are made, students at Leipzig University have taken a look at what has become of the old ones. To do this, they developed the first coalition tracker at state level in Germany. It is a tool that makes election promises measurable.
Hundreds of pages, line by line
Together with the SWR Data Lab, the data journalism team at Südwestrundfunk, nine students took a very close look at the coalition agreements of the state governments in Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate. A coalition agreement is the written program of a government: What do we want to achieve in the coming years? The students found 433 specific plans for Baden-Württemberg and examined every single one of them. "It wasn't as easy as it might sound," says student Julia Mayer. "The coalition agreements are very vaguely worded in many places. We had to develop clear criteria to ensure comparability. In the end, we had a detailed system of categories, and yet there were always borderline cases that we discussed intensively."
The research was time-consuming. Planned railroad lines, new rules for farmers, digitization projects in schools - the team searched for evidence for each goal. Where none were found, the students asked the ministries directly. In the end, each project was assigned to one of seven categories: from "implemented" to "failed".
Journalism as a tool of democracy
A large proportion of the projects in Baden-Württemberg were implemented. But there are differences. In the area of society and democracy, 74 percent of the goals were fully implemented. In the area of construction and housing, only 40 percent were achieved. The interactive tool is now available on the SWR website. Users can view each project with sources and evaluation or be surprised by a random function. The tracker for Rhineland-Palatinate will follow on 5 March.
Prof. Dr. Markus Beiler, Head of the Master's degree course at Leipzig University, explains the project: "Especially in these times, when the world is full of disinformation, the coalition tracker offers orientation and the opportunity to find out more about political actions. This shows the importance of journalism for our democracy." The project shows how data journalistic methods can make political processes transparent.
Further information at:
https://www.swr.de/regierungscheck
