The European Parliament Elections 2019

Abstract

Since 1979 EU citizens have the right vote in Elections for the European Parliament. Despite the ambition to create a direct democratic link between citizens and EU policy-making, for many years citizens did not vote on the basis of their attitudes towards EU issues, but commonly relied on proxies, most notably national politics, when voting in European Parliament elections. According to the second-order model (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Van der Eijk and Franklin 1996), voters regard EP elections as less important than first order, national elections. This resulted in higher levels of abstention, voting on the basis of national heuristics, punishing national government parties or voting for small parties. Thus, EP elections have long been conceived as relatively unimportant mid-term elections rather than as reflecting public opinion about Europe. In recent times, however, the second-order national election model has undergone revision. Several studies suggest that the increased salience of EU issues has made EU attitudes increasingly important for vote decisions. In the 2014 EP elections, EU attitudes were found to have strong effects on voting for Eurosceptic parties, which was partly explained by the specific context of the 2014 EP elections, which took place in the aftermath of the Eurozone crisis (Hobolt 2015; Hobolt and De Vries 2016). Several studies however suggest a more general mechanism, where heightened EU politicization (i.e. salience and partisan conflict) increases the impact of EU attitudes on voting behaviour. Following developments around the migration influx into Europe and more recently the Brexit discussions, the EU does not seem to have lost in salience in the run-up to the 2019 EP elections. Another common trend that has made its way to the European stage is the personalization of politics. For instance, the introduction of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten system for the Presidency of the EU commission has added a much more personal note to EP election campaigns. In sum, the 2019 EP elections may represent real first order elections and deserve close inspection. The papers included in this panel test and examine the mentioned developments of increasing EU issue relevance and personalisation of politics in the context of the 2019 EP elections. To do so, all papers rely on original large-scale data collections that are already on its way or will be conducted in the coming months. The papers tackle different aspects, such as the relevance of EU vs. domestic issues for vote choice, the moderating role of policy competences between the EU and the nation states for issue-ownership voting, and the influence of candidate characteristics and related campaign strategies for the electoral success at the ballot box. A common feature of all studies is their comparative approach by including between 8 and all 27(28) EU countries. Such an approach takes account of the political and cultural differences across EU member states, which potentially result in important context effects for the aspects under study.