The historical low turnout and the rise of Eurosceptic parties in the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2014 pose a great challenge for the future of European integration: Never before has the EP been legitimated by a smaller share of European citizens and never have so many Eurosceptic parties had seats in the EP. Additionally, the constantly large differences between turnout in European and national elections have long been and continue to be part of the EU democratic deficit debate.
In this paper, I aim to access this 'Euro gap' in turnout (Rose 2004). While the dominant paradigm of this research area, the ‘second-order hypothesis’, postulates that the turnout gap results from the perceived lesser importance of EP elections, this paper proposes a different explanation. I argue that particular Eurosceptic citizens who want to express their discontent with the current state of European integration have a second rational option besides voting for Eurosceptic parties: They can also stay away from the ballot boxes in order to delegitimize the EU with a low turnout or to simply express their dissatisfaction. Thereby, they engage in EU-specific non-voting, meaning that they abstain in EP elections while participating in national elections and thus contribute to an enlarged ‘Euro gap’.
To test this hypothesis and its inter-temporal validity, I conduct multinomial regression analyses using the post-election voter surveys of the 2009 and 2014 European Election Studies. The findings reveal first that – contrary to the second-order hypothesis – ‘Europe matters’ for citizens’ participation in EP elections today. Secondly, Eurosceptic orientations can explain why citizens engage in EU-specific non-voting, but much less why they do not participate in elections in general. Thirdly, it seems that the financial and economic crisis in Europe has increased the size of this effect. All in all, the paper increases our understanding of the so called ‘Euro gap’ in voter turnout.
