A gentle introduction to government structures in Berlin

An image of Berlin's town hall with a fountain in the foreground

The Rotes Rathaus, seat of Berlin’s city government. Photo by Fionn Große on Unsplash

Since 2018, I’ve worked in a role that requires me to have a lot of interaction with local government and administrative officials. As such, I’ve learned a lot about how Berlin’s government and public administration are set up and function (though of course I wouldn’t claim to know everything). I’ve also found that there is a dearth of English-language resources for non-German speakers on how local government and administration works in Berlin, which I think is a shame, given how many non-Germans live in this city (a quarter of the population lacks a German passport) and how much our lives here can be affected – positively and negatively – by decisions the government makes or processes the administration implements.

To help people with limited German skills and/or a limited understanding of how politics and administration work in Berlin, I’ve prepared a high-level overview of Berlin’s governmental and administrative structures.

This is not meant to be an exhaustive or academic summation of what different institutions exist, what powers they have, and how they interact with each other. Instead, this is meant to give people with no knowledge of how government works in Berlin a basic understanding of what different organizations are involved (and a vocabulary to go with that understanding), what they do, and what effects they might have on your life as a citizen in Berlin. My hope is that after reading this, you feel empowered to do your own further research on relevant topics, or maybe you have important additional context that helps you better understand newspaper articles about local politics.

Overview

In this post, I am going to focus on three main organizational groupings that encompass the primary political/legislative, executive and administrative functions in Berlin’s democracy. These are the:

  • State-level parliament (Abgeordnetenhaus)

  • State-level executive and administrative bodies (Berliner Senat, Hauptverwaltung)

  • District-level executive, administrative and legislative bodies (Bezirksamt, Bezirksverordnetenversammlungen)

Note that there are both state-level and district-level entities listed here – Berlin is a city-state, and this two-part structure is key to understanding how politics and administration works in Berlin. There is a central, state-level executive authority (the Berlin Senate), a state-level public administration (the Hauptverwaltung) as well as a state-level parliament (the Abgeordnetenhaus). But each of Berlin’s 12 districts also have their own governments and parliaments(ish).

Generally, each level (state and local/district) has its own distinct sphere of influence – as this explanatory page from the Berlin city government clarifies, the Hauptverwaltung oversees and coordinates topics that have a Berlin-wide significance (like the city’s budget or the police), while the Bezirksverwaltungen oversee and coordinate topics that are more local, like managing parks or schools.

In reality, these divisions aren’t always so explicit, and the Hauptverwaltung and the Bezirksverwaltungen actually share many topics in common (for example: both the Hauptverwaltung and the Bezirke are responsible for maintaining and expanding bike infrastructure in the city, but exactly who is responsible for what project depends on the scale of the project and its funding source). Theoretically the explicit responsibilities of each half of the city administration are clearly defined, but in reality, this thematic overlap is a major reason why policy-making and bureaucracy can be so challenging in Berlin: even when the nature of a problem is very clear, it is not always clear who exactly should be responsible for deciding what should be done and who should be the one to actually implement that decision.

In the next blocks, I’ll go into more depth on the three divisions listed above (the state-level parliament, the state-level executive and administrative bodies, and the district-level legislative, executive and administrative bodies).

A note on translations: where possible, I try to use the same English translations used by a government entity themselves (i.e., on their English webpages, to the extent that these exist). Otherwise, I have translated terms myself using my best attempt to capture the meaning of the German term.

State-level Parliament

Overview

When it comes to lawmaking, the central authority in Berlin is the Abgeordnetenhaus (this term effectively translates to House of Representatives). This is a body of at least 130 representatives, though the number can be higher due to the possibility of “overhang seats” – I won’t get into that more here, read the Wikipedia page if you’re interested. The 2016-2021 parliament had 160 members in total; the newest parliament (elected in September 2021) has 147.

The Abgeordnetenhaus is elected every five years. Representatives gain a seat through a mixture of direct election (i.e., candidates who represent a specific district) and party lists. This is the same system used at the federal level in Germany. Each Bezirk in Berlin is broken up into a certain number of electoral districts (Wahlkreise in German). In total, there are 78 Wahlkreise in the city (and thus 78 directly-elected representatives in the Abgeordnetenhaus). The rest of the members of the parliament are chosen from ranked lists of members from the respective political parties; depending on the share of votes a party receives, it will receive a proportional number of seats to which it will assign candidates from its list.

The Abgeordnetenhaus functions like parliaments at other levels of government and in other countries: almost every parliamentarian belongs to a party (there are currently 6 parties in the Berlin parliament, representing the same 6 parties that are in the federal parliament), and legislation is drafted, negotiated and voted on within these parties.

Tasks / Role

Importantly, the Abgeordnetenhaus names the governing mayor of the city (see next section) – so, the party that receives the most seats in the Abgeordnetenhaus generally gets to lead the government and thus put their desired candidate in place as mayor. As in other parliamentary systems, since a single party often doesn’t hold a majority of seats, it’s normal for the party with a plurality of seats to build a coalition to ensure they have the votes necessary to advance their agenda. The 2021 election led to the formation of a “Red-Green-Red” coalition, that is, a coalition between the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party (with the SPD appointing their top candidate, Franziska Giffey, as mayor, since they had the most seats overall in the parliament).

Otherwise, the primary role of the Abgeordnetenhaus is what you would expect: the drafting and passing of legislation. The drafts may come from the parties themselves, or they may come from within the Senate (see below), or through a “citizen’s initiative” (Volksinitiative).

The Abgeordnetenhaus has a variety of committees that deal with specific topics (like education, technology and digitization, mobility, etc.). Committee meetings are generally open to the public and their minutes are public record. You can find a list of current committees here (as well as links to where you can find livestreams for committee meetings). (Note: As of January 2022, it appears that the new committees have not yet been formed, or at least the website has not yet been updated, so there currently are no committees listed).

Another major function of the Abgeordnetenhaus is the ability of the parliament to demand the government report on certain matters or answer questions about the status of a given policy/initiative. For example, committees can request that representatives from the administration attend a committee meeting to report on the progress of a given strategy (and answer questions from committee members). And individual representatives are able to submit parliamentary inquiries to government agencies to ask specific questions about the work of these agencies – for example, to ask the agency’s stance on a given subject or to ask what progress has been made on a given promise. The agencies are obligated to respond to these inquiries (although the answers can sometimes be very short, if the agency feels that the question has been misdirected toward them / the topic in question is not something they have anything to do with).

In German, these inquiries are called “schriftliche Anfragen” and the answers to them are public record, so they can be a particularly valuable way to get insight into the government’s activities, as well as access to data/information that is not currently publicly accessible but for which there is no legal reason to withhold the information.

The latter can be particularly useful for citizens to be aware of: if there is an issue in your neighborhood that you have tried unsuccessfully to follow up on – for example, the city said it would install a new crosswalk at a given intersection two years ago, but to the best of your knowledge no progress on this has been made and you haven’t heard any updates – you can reach out to your representative and ask if they would be willing to submit an inquiry on the topic. Since government agencies are obligated to react to the inquiry, this can be an effective way to get more information on the status of something, and of course it can also help to build pressure to rectify an unsatisfactory situation (particularly if the answer reveals major failures/deficiencies in the government’s handling of the situation – the answers to these inquiries are often fodder for local newspapers eager to report on the latest embarrassment in local government). You can view the most recently answered inquiries here (and if you want to know more about these inquiries in general, and specifically how governments all across Germany have failed in making the answers to them truly accessible to citizens, see my blog post from three years ago).

Want to find out who’s representing your district in the Abgeordnetenhaus (or what district you even live in)? The official website of Berln’s Abgeordnetenhaus has a tool here where you can provide your full address (street name, address, and postal code) to find out who your representative is. If you want to dive more into this person’s background – specifically, what kinds of stances they have or what laws they have voted for or against – I recommend using the website Abgeordnetenwatch, an independent, non-profit organization that aims to create more transparency in parliaments across Germany.

Hauptverwaltung / Central Administration

While the Abgeordnetenhaus is the state-level legislative entity in Berlin, the Hauptverwaltung (“central administration”) is the state-level executive and administrative entity. Specifically, it’s comprised of the Senate (Berliner Senat), an executive governing body, and the Senate Departments (Senatsverwaltungen), which are administrative units responsible for carrying out the policymaking that happens at the executive or parliamentary levels.

Berliner Senat / Berlin Senate

The Berlin Senate is an executive body led by the “governing mayor” (“regierende*r Bürgermeister*in”) of Berlin. As mentioned in the previous section, the governing mayor is appointed by a majority vote of the parliament (similar to how a prime minister would be elected by a parliament). Once appointed, the governing mayor chooses up to 10 fellow members of state parliament to join him or her in the Senate as a senator; the governing mayor can also remove senators from their positions. Two of these senators will be named deputy mayors (“stellvertretende*r Bürgermeister*in”). This distinction is the reason Berlin doesn’t just have a mayor, but rather a “governing” mayor, to differentiate from the additional deputy mayors. In the case of a coalition government, it’s standard that these deputy mayors will be chosen from the other parties represented in the government (so with Berlin’s recently established SPD-Greens-Left coalition, the governing mayor is from the SPD, and the two deputy mayors are from the other two coalition partners.

Each Senator is assigned one or more thematic policy areas that they oversee (e.g. labor affairs, education, health, etc.). These thematic areas form the basis for the Senate Departments (“Senatsverwaltungen” – see below).

The Senate advises the mayor on policy issues and also drafts legislation that is then sent to the state parliament for approval.

You can find an overview of all of Berlin’s current senators here.

Senatsverwaltungen / Senate Departments

Each Senator heads a Senatsverwaltung (Senate Department) that corresponds to the thematic areas they are in charge of. These thematic areas are not pre-set, so each new legislative period tends to see some shuffling of topics (compare this list of Senate Departments from former governing mayor Michael Müller’s first and second legislative periods, for example – RIP, SenWTF).

These are the current senate departments in English, German and, if applicable, some of their common shortened forms; I’ve also linked to their websites, where you can get a better understanding of what kinds of topics these departments work on (some Senatsverwaltungen even have some content available in English). Some of these names departments are quite new, since the new ruling coalition was only announced at the end of December 2021 and thus the new Senatsverwaltungen were only announced at the end of 2021. For that reason, you may notice that not all websites have been updated to reflect new names.

Within each Senate Department there are a handful of State Secretaries (Staatssekretär*innen) that work underneath the Senator. Unlike the Senators, these State Secretaries are civil servants, i.e., they were not elected to their offices but instead typically have already been working for the city government. These State Secretaries tend to be responsible for a portion of the thematic areas covered by a Senate Department. For example, the Senatsverwaltung für Wissenschaft, Gesundheit, Pflege und Gleichstellung has a State Secretary for Gesundheit and Pflege (Health and Care) and a State Secretary for Wissenschaft (Research) and Gleichstellung (Equality). The Senatsverwaltung für Integration, Arbeit und Soziales has a State Secretary for Integration and Soziales (Social Affairs) and a State Secretary for Arbeit (Labor Affairs).

If you want to get an overview of who is leading a given Senatsverwaltung, the “Über uns” page of an individual Senatsverwaltung usually includes a link to an organigram for the institution (see here for an example – there is an organigram linked on the right-hand side).

A lot of policymaking as well as policy implementation and general administration happens in the Senatsverwaltungen. Since the Bezirke are also involved in some policymaking and a lot of policy implementation as well, the role of the Senatsverwaltungen is usually either broad agenda-setting for the whole city, or focusing on issues that can’t be left to an individual Bezirk to manage independently (think, things like the failed Berlin Mietendeckel, which aimed to suppress rent prices across the entire city, or the implementation of Berlin’s Mobilitätsgesetz, which affects mobility planning for the whole city).

Alongside the Senatsverwaltungen, you may be familiar with some of Berlin’s “nachgeordnete Behörden” (“subordinate agencies”), which are largely freestanding government offices that tend to have a focus on providing direct services to citizens. For example, everyone’s favorite Landesamt für Einwanderung (aka the Ausländerbehörde or Foreigner’s Office) is a nachgeordnete Behörde “belonging” to the Senatsverwaltung für Inneres und Sport. There is also the Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales (LAGeSo, State Office for Health and Social Affairs), for example, which does things like regulate medical facilities in the city or monitor the water quality of designated swimming spots, and which answers to the Senatsverwaltung für Integration, Arbeit und Soziales.

Bezirkliche Verwaltungen / District Administrations

Berlin is comprised of 12 different districts or boroughs, known in German as Bezirke. They are:

  • Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf

  • Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg

  • Lichtenberg

  • Marzahn-Hellersdorf

  • Mitte

  • Neukölln

  • Pankow

  • Reinickendorf

  • Spandau

  • Steglitz-Zehlendorf

  • Tempelhof-Schöneberg

  • Treptow-Köpenick

As recently as 2001 there were 23 different Bezirke; occasionally you’ll see references to the “old” Bezirke in older or outdated documents, or in statistical analyses that continue to use the old divisions for the sake of continuity.

The most important thing to understand about Berlin’s Bezirke from an organizational perspective is that they function more like individual, autonomous municipalities than administrative districts subordinate to a central city-wide administration (though they are not fully independent municipalities).

This is often confusing for residents, especially non-Germans, because we don’t usually think of our lives here in terms of Bezirk boundaries – I don’t tell people that I live in Treptow-Köpenick and work in Tempelhof-Schöneberg and that I used to live in northern Mitte. I would say I live in Köpenick, that I work in Tempelhof and I used to live in Wedding (in particular, telling people you live in Mitte when you live in Wedding would sound very odd to most Berliners given the opposing reputations those two areas have). Berliners tend to break up their world into smaller units, some formal (like official administrative areas like Wedding or Prenzlauer Berg) and some more informal (think individual Kieze or neighborhoods); the act of crossing a Bezirk boundary is not something you typically think about. And at the end of the day, all these places are part of the same city – you wouldn’t really expect that you could have radically different experiences living in one Bezirk versus another.

The reality is, however, that there is actually a fair amount that can vary in your day-to-day life depending on which Bezirk you live in. Individual Bezirke are responsible for areas like the management of schools and daycares (such as the system by which grade schoolers are assigned to an elementary school), issuing construction permits (such as for new homes), and, in many cases, for maintaining public infrastructure, like roads and bike paths (though this is not always the case). Each Bezirk has a fair amount of autonomy to decide how they will go about these tasks and what systems and processes they’ll set up around them (though of course in many cases there are laws or other regulations that limit their ability to get too creative).

The line between what Bezirke are responsible for and what the Senatsverwaltungen are responsible for is not at all clearly defined (the relevant law basically lists out a few broad areas for which the central government is responsible, and then the Bezirke are responsible for everything else), and there are frequently disputes between these two levels about who is responsible for what (predictably, when someone needs to be blamed for something, it’s always the other institution’s fault).

When it comes to understanding how the Bezirke function in a political and administrative sense, there are two main entities you should be aware of: the Bezirksamt and the Bezirksverordnetenversammlung (BVV).

Bezirksamt

Just like the Berliner Senat, the state executive authority, has the Hauptverwaltung as its central administrative authority, the Bezirke each have a Bezirksamt (district office) that is their respective administrative authority.

The Bezirksämter are each headed by a single mayor (Bürgermeister*in). Just like at the state level, this person is appointed by the parliamentary body within the Bezirk (the Bezirksverordnetenversammlung or BVV, see below). In addition to the mayor, each Bezirk has 4 “Bezirksstadtsrät:innen”, which can be loosely translated as “city councilors”. These are typically selected from the representatives elected to the BVV. Each councilor is assigned a collection of thematic areas to be responsible for – think, topics like “social affairs and youth issues” or “health” or “environment”. These thematic areas in turn correspond to specific departments (Fachämter) within the Bezirksamt which the councilor is in charge of (so a councilor responsible for “health and environment” will be the head of the district health office as well as the district environmental and nature protection office).

These thematic areas are not totally standardized across Bezirke – because the departments within a given Bezirksamt are also not (yet) standardized. Yes, Berlin has 12 different districts that each have their own unique organizational structure. As you might imagine, this is not particularly efficient when trying to create structures or processes that are supposed to span all of the Bezirke. That said, the differences aren’t massive (thanks to recent and ongoing efforts to standardize organizational structures), and the Bezirke generally have the same overarching departments, like the Straßen- und Grünflächenamt (Department of Streets and Green Spaces) or the Stadtentwicklungsamt (Department for Urban Development). But the actual responsibilities or sub-divisions of those departments might vary across districts.

If you care about certain changes happening in your Kiez, such better road signage marking a dangerous pedestrian intersection, or aesthetic improvement of unsightly areas, your Bezirksamt is often the best place to start with your inquiry. Finding the right person or office to contact is no easy feat, so be prepared to put your German skills to work (or consider reaching out to your representative in the Abgeordnetenhaus for assistance), but generally the district offices try to be responsive to citizen inquiries, or at least tell you what the proper way to submit your inquiry would be.

If you want to better understand how your local Bezirksamt is structured and what departments it contains, check its website. Each Bezirksamt will have a wealth of information online about that district’s administrative office and its structures. For example, here you can see the Bezirksamt Treptow-Köpenick’s sub-page for “Politics and Administration” where you can view an organigram for the district office as well as explore different subdivisions of it on the left-hand side. This information isn’t always well-structured – and frequently not optimized for an audience outside of the city government – but if you click around enough, you might be surprised just how much you can find online.

Bezirksverordnetenversammlung

The last body I wanted to highlight in this piece is the BVV, or Bezirksverordnetenversammlung. This is effectively a parliament for an individual Bezirk (thus, there are 12 different BVVs in Berlin, one for each district). That said, a BVV isn’t quite the same as the Abgeordnetenhaus: for example, it cannot pass laws. Instead, they can only pass resolutions and recommendations (which the Bezirksamt is still obligated to act upon, despite them not being laws).

The representatives in the BVV are elected by the voting-eligible citizens in that district. Unlike for the Abgeordnetenhaus, voting-age EU citizens are able to vote for BVV representatives along with voting-age Germans.

There is either a maximum or a minimum of 55 members in the BVV – to be honest, I am a bit unsure here because Berlin’s official resource on the matter says at least 55, and the German Wikipedia page says at most 55. Berlin’s constitution says… exactly 55 (Artikel 70)? So I’m not quite sure what the correct answer here is; would love it if someone could clarify this for me. Anways: The representatives typically represent political parties, the same as in the Abgehordnetenhaus. But because BVV politics are more local, you might see more obscure parties represented there that aren’t present at the state level, since it can be easier for such parties to get a foothold in more local elections. Moreover, unlike in the Abgeordnetenhaus, there are no direct representatives elected to the BVV – seats are assigned solely based on the proportion of votes a given party received in the Bezirk-wide election.

As far as responsibilities go, one of the core tasks of the BVV is electing the Bezirk’s mayor, as well as the Stadträt:innen. The BVV can also recommend the Bezirksamt do something (like research the feasibility of a given measure, or develop a strategy to address a certain problem) or demand the Bezirksamt provide information on a given topic (i.e., that the Bezirksamt report on the status of a given project or initiative).

Each BVV also has a number of committees (Ausschüsse) that its members participate in. This is where the bulk of the BVV’s work happens. Examples of committees you might find in a BVV are the Committee for Sports, Committee for Urban Development and Construction, and the Committee for Integration. Each Bezirk’s BVV will have a somewhat different assortment of committees; here, for example, is a list of all current and historical committees in the BVV for Treptow-Köpenick.

Each BVV has a relatively thorough web presence, where you can view information like a list of all current members, official documents emanating from committee meetings and regular sessions of the full BVV, and a list of all public and non-public upcoming and historical meetings related to the BVV (i.e. committee meetings or party-specific meetings). As an example I have linked to pages for the Bezirk Treptow-Köpenick, but each Bezirk’s BVV has its own website; you can see a list of all these pages at the bottom of this article.

Closing thoughts

I hope this post is helpful to you. I tried to keep things as simple and straightforward as possible; this of course means that there is much more that could be said on all of these topics. My goal was just to give you the tools and basic knowledge you need to do further research on your own, not to write up a treatise on the ins and outs of governmental entities in Berlin. As a general resource for further reading, I recommend this page from the city government, which does a good job presenting much of the same information I’ve summarized here, albeit only in German.

If you think you’ve found an error, think I’ve grossly misunderstood how something works, or you think something important is missing from this piece, please feel free to leave a comment with your observation, or reach out to me directly on Twitter or via e-mail!

Tori Boeck