European elections are second-order elections that are subordinated to national elections. The fact that no government formation is at stake has important consequences for turnout levels, national government parties’ performance, and voters’ calculus (Reif and Schmitt, 1980).
While these patterns are well established in the literature, we only have a limited understanding of how the existence of these secondary elections, in turn, has itself implications for party competition within the domestic arena. This paper posits that European Parliament (EP) elections serve as a springboard for success in the national arena: the structural advantages that small and radical parties enjoy in the supranational arena may have repercussive effects for national party competition (van der Eijk et al., 1996).
Electoral success in the EP elections may significantly alter the trajectories of small and radical parties in the national arena. Depending on the temporal proximity to the subsequent national election, a strong EP electoral result can signal viability, reduce information uncertainty about the parties, and enhance their visibility in the domestic political discourse, thereby engendering ‘first-order effects’ of these second-order elections. Given the temporal distance between the national election and a European election is close, I expect electoral success of small and radical parties to spill-over to the national arena due to priming effects, a heightened domestic visibility and a process of de-tabooisation following success of radical parties.
Drawing on an original and novel database encompassing the electoral results of all EU member states in national and EP elections since 1979, the temporal distance between these elections and their position within the respective electoral cycles, I test the hypotheses on the aggregate level using a TSCS country-fixed effects model. The results indicate that particularly radical right parties benefit from a spill-over of EP gains to the national arena, suggesting that their national or ‘first-order’ campaigns, their domestic newsworthiness and their socially accepted viability after success in the EP election are decisive to work in favour of an electoral spill-over. Accounting for a possible endogeneity of the results, I include various placebo-tests to corroborate the argument that success in the EP election has a unique signalling capacity for the radical right, which is specific for the impact from the EP election and is different from similar popularity levels of the parties at both times of the EP and the national election.
The findings of the analysis have important implications for our understanding of the EP elections. While previous research has mostly addressed the character of the European contests, the literature has thus far overlooked that these elections have critical consequences for the following national contests. In emphasising one crucial but neglected implication of these elections for national party competition – a spill-over of radical right success, the analysis sheds light on what might be regarded as the dark side of these elections: the ascendancy of the radical right.
