Changing generational tides: A study of the transformation of electoral participation and party preferences across generations in European Parliament elections

Since 1979, European Parliament (EP) elections have been predominantly regarded as second-order national arenas where little is considered consequential and related to Europe. However, the electoral context in which EP elections are held nowadays seems different from four decades ago, with a widened reach of the EU and unprecedented salience of European integration. Although the temporal robustness of the second-order election (SOE) model is being increasingly tested, the consideration of generational differences remains absent, yet relevant. Notably, if habits of voting and non-voting are determined by earlier electoral experiences, and later stages of life are accompanied by increasing attitudinal stability, changes in how citizens participate and vote in EP elections could be brought about through generational replacement. This ‘age-period-cohort’ study fills this void by investigating the long-term transformation of electoral participation and party preferences in EP elections through the lens of generational differences. It compares how various generations socializing in distinct electoral contexts participate differently in EP elections and national first-order elections; it further investigates how positional distance regarding the issue of European integration affects party voting propensity in EP elections across generations. It employs survey data over four decades across 12 Western European countries from the European Election Studies (EES) and the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). With the effects of age and period controlled for, it reveals a reversing generational participatory pattern in EP elections, contrary to the widely observed ‘negative’ effect of generational replacement on turnout. Specifically, while younger generations participate increasingly less in national elections than their earlier generational counterparts, the youngest generation socialized in a series of European crises is more electorally engaged in EP elections than the one socialized soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In addition, it shows the growing relevance of European integration to party preferences among younger generations, despite the presence of period effects. These results not only challenge the theoretical grounds of the SOE model dominating the research on EP elections but also have important implications for the future trends of democratic deficit and participatory inequalities in national and European politics as well as the evolving dimensionality of European political space.