Europeanising the political agenda? Revisiting the second-order thesis through the concept of discursive issue-linkages

The elections to the European parliament are important as a potential source of legitimacy and accountability for the EU. Yet, a persistent critique since the direct elections began in 1979 has been that this potential is not met because of the second-order nature of the EP elections. Studies have suggested that voters base their decisions on domestic politics, such as support for the incumbent party, rather than European issues (e.g., Schmitt, 2005; Hix and Marsh, 2011). Meanwhile, the second-order thesis has been increasingly questioned in recent times, in terms of how these elections are second-order to voters (Hobolt, 2014), but also whether they are second-order to politicians (Spoon, 2012; Braun et al., 2016). These mixed results show the need to further revisit the empirical claim that the EP elections are not sufficiently Europeanised to provide the necessary legitimacy to the European parliament. These debates also pinpoint the need for a continued theoretical discussion on what constitutes a second-order election in the European context. For elections to fill their function, it is essential that voters are provided with sufficient information and that parties offer political alternatives. This paper follows up on this supply dimension to the EP elections and asks to what extent issues are seen as linked to European integration in the media and by political parties. Furthermore, it engages with the question of what is politicised in these campaigns, whether it is the polity or policy dimensions of the EU (e.g., Braun et al., 2016). Through the concept of ‘discursive issue-linkages’ (Graneng, forthcoming), the paper presents a novel theoretical approach to assessing these questions. It also contributes to our empirical knowledge through a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis of the 2024 EP election campaigns in three countries, Germany, Ireland and Sweden.