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Social bots mimic and potentially manipulate humans and human behaviours in social networks. Especially the public sphere is vulnerable to their impact. We first discuss their potential influence on the public sphere from a theoretical perspective. From an empirical perspective, we then analysed all Twitter follower of seven German parties before (N=1,180,362) and during the 2017 electoral campaigns (N=1,588,213) regarding bot prevalence and activity. The results revealed that the share of social bots increased from 7.1% before to 9.8% during the election campaigns. The share of active social bots remained about the same. A special focus on newcomer AfD showed that this right-wing populist party did not have more bots than the other parties, but the smallest share. We discuss the results against the background of normative traditions of public sphere theories and address methodological challenges that bots pose in the field of political communication.