European Parliamentary elections are playgrounds for testing normative claims about the desirability of a transnational public sphere, ultimately enabling the establishment of a truly pan-European voting space. So far, however, this transnational public sphere is hardly a reality and voting in EP elections still remains national in nature. Debates about possible improvements of this situation have been mostly limited to a “view from above”, i.e., constituted as an elite-driven process.
In our paper, we offer an alternative path for “Europeanizing European elections”. We take issue with citizens’ implicit as well as explicit preferences for a transnationalization of European Parliamentary Elections. We make use of the data generated by the EU Profiler, the largest Pan-European voting advice application that was created to cover the 2009 EP elections. Users could position themselves on 30 statements, ranging across a wide range of political dimensions. In total, roughly 900’000 users fully filled out the 30 statements across Europe. Besides comparing their views with the offer of the respective national parties, EU Profiler users could also assess their ideological match with parties beyond their countries.
Our results show that a wide majority of users could actually find a better ideological match with parties competing in a different country than their own. Most importantly, we find that a significant proportion of these users is led to declare that such an outcome “made them willing to vote for a party outside their national boundaries”. Through multi-level logit estimation, we investigate the determinants of users’ willingness to cast a transnational vote, taking into account both individual-level and contextual-level factors. The discussion of our findings provides support for the “transnationalization” argument when it comes to citizens’ implicit as well as explicit preferences.
