Does protest affect MP roll-call votes in Germany?

In this chapter, I want to honour Thomas Saalfeld’s mentorship, particularly his insistence on marrying rigorous methods with deep contextual understanding, by examining how protests shape the tempo of legislative action in the German Bundestag. Building on Saalfeld and colleagues’ landmark roll-call dataset, I merge six decades of recorded votes with a comprehensive catalogue of demonstrations by policy area, size, and police involvement. Employing survival analysis, I model the “time-to-vote” as a function of protest intensity, law enforcement presence, and media coverage. Contrary to expectations of direct protest effects, I find that protests significantly lower the policy process. These results illuminate the conditional pathways through which collective action enters parliamentary decision-making, extend Saalfeld’s insights into institutional selectivity, and offer a nuanced framework for understanding legislative responsiveness in established democracies.