Social Dispersion in European Elections: Inequality on Steroids?

A successful future of the European Union (EU) depends on its ability to integrate all European citizens in its democratic processes. High participation by all socioeconomic groups is also an integral part of the ideal of political equality and a basic prerequisite for the legitimacy of any democratic system. Although European integration was long viewed as an elite project, the EU has become substantially more democratic over time, notably with the introduction of direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) in 1979. Despite this, EP elections are still widely considered to be second-order, low-salience contests and continue to exhibit low voter turnout. According to Tingsten’s law of dispersion (1937), lower levels of turnout are associated with greater socioeconomic inequality in participation. Given that turnout in European elections is substantially lower than in national parliamentary elections, EP elections should, in principle, display higher levels of social dispersion. If true, this would reinforce claims that the EU suffers from an intrinsic democratic deficit and elitist mobilization patterns. To investigate whether European elections are truly more unequal than national ones, thirty partial proportional odds models were calculated using a novel dataset from the ActEU Horizon Europe Project. As the survey focuses on long-term voting patterns, covers ten EU countries and a plethora of socioeconomic variables, this is the most comprehensive research on Tingsten's law to date. Contrary to expectations, the findings show that lower turnout in European elections does not translate into greater social dispersion relative to national parliamentary elections. These results challenge Tingsten’s law and the common assumption that low-turnout elections necessarily exacerbate inequality. When EU turnout is very low (below 30%), the opposite effect can be even observed, with less social dispersion than in national parliamentary elections. This is consistent with theories of unequal mobilization. Taken together, the findings suggest that the frequent characterization of European integration as elitest does not hold — at least with regard to voter turnout. Moreover, they call into question the normative and empirical assumptions underpinning some “Get Out the Vote” campaigns, which often equate higher turnout with greater democratic equality.