Between Second-Order and Pan-European Dynamics: Revisiting Citizens’ Behaviour in European Parliament Elections Forty Years On

After more than four decades of direct elections to the European Parliament, the “second-order election” paradigm remains a dominant interpretative framework, yet its explanatory power appears increasingly contested. Building on recent contributions that reassess the classic model in light of the 2024 contest and emerging pan-European electoral dynamics (Hix and Cunningham 2025), this paper revisits the relationship between citizen attitudes, national contexts, and electoral behaviour in European Parliament elections through a comparative and multilevel perspective. Drawing on a rich collection of individual-level surveys complemented by contextual indicators at the country and election level, the study examines how patterns of participation, party choice, and perceived political stakes have evolved over time. The analysis explores whether changes in European identity, issue salience, and the politicization of the EU contribute to a process of “Europeanization” of electoral behaviour, challenging the classical second-order logic. Multilevel models allow disentangling individual and contextual effects, identifying cross-national variation in the drivers of vote choice and abstention. The findings highlight both the persistence and transformation of second-order mechanisms, suggesting that European elections are increasingly shaped by a dual logic-rooted in national politics yet influenced by the growing relevance of EU-level dynamics.