What does the European Voter Expect from Members of the European Parliament? A Conjoint Survey Experiment of Citizens’ Preferences

Voters’ preferences towards European candidates remains an unexplored topic of particular importance and saliency in reference to the European Parliament elections in 2019. What do citizens expect from their European representatives? How do these expectations influence their vote choice? We examine these questions with the help of a conjoint survey experiment where we combine commonly employed candidate attributes, such as gender and ideology, with attributes unique to EP elections such as citizenship, geographical focus of representation and view on European integration. We use a representative sample of the Finnish population (n=800) since candidate choice is here particularly relevant due to the open list PR system where voters vote for candidates rather than parties. We report the findings from the survey launched during May 2019 in conjunction to the election campaign for the EP elections.