A Fistful of Followers: the Resilience of the Second-Order Campaign Model in EP Elections in Bailout Countries

One of the most repeated dictums about European elections is that they are ‘not about Europe’, a notion that reflects the near ubiquitous description of EP elections as the archetypal second-order national election. This is reflected in the lack of European content in EP campaigns, caused by parties’ failure to campaign on European issues and media coverage that focusses on domestic dimensions in the little coverage it provides of EP elections. This received wisdom merits further examination. As Reif & Schmitt noted, EP elections are second-order only insofar as there is less at stake. If national political systems no longer “decide most of what there is to be decided” – if such decisions are made at the EU level –there should be a shift in how EP elections are perceived. The bailout programmes that have taken place in a number of EU member-states since 2010 allow us to assess the notion of EP elections as second-order national elections in a new light. These programmes generated considerable salience for European politics, given the central role of EU institutions in the way their bailouts played out. This article seeks to assess the extent to which the bailout context shaped the European election campaigns, by assessing parties’ communication strategies in social media. It analyses levels of social media activity and saliency for the European issue, by comparing parties’ activities in four countries that underwent bailouts prior to the 2014 EP elections to five other non-bailout Eurozone countries. It also addresses the extent to which parties’ activities are different depending on the timing of the EP contest within the first-order electoral cycle. This article draws on a dataset of Facebook publications of 124 political parties running for the 2014 European Elections and data for the national elections before and after the 2014 EP elections.