These sources of political participation in Germany have a unique system which encourages participation in government in many forms such as party membership, institutionalized interest groups, and making conscious voting choices. These structural forms of political participation allow voters to have a greater voice in policy making as well as promote issues that are important to the public. Although Germans have many outlets of governmental participation through elections, interest groups, and parties, there are some disadvantages to their forms of political and interest representation.
Political participation in the form of voting is extremely popular in Germany as “voting affords the German citizen the major formal means of influence in the policy making process” Germany uses a complex electoral system called mixed member proportional, which is a mixture of pure proportional representation and single district representation. This allows for having both personal representation in the lower house of parliament, the Bundesrat, while having proportional representation via parties in the upper house,