Second-Order Candidate Selection in the National and European Parliament Elections

A great deal of conceptual and empirical work has been done on the second-order nature of the European Parliament elections. In this paper, we propose to extend this model to incorporate candidate selection procedures. To illustrate our argument, we compare the 2019 national and European Parliament elections in Poland using an original, large-scale candidate study as our primary source. Our findings show that, as expected, the European Parliament elections exhibit greater centralization, whilst both electoral arenas have similar levels of exclusiveness of the selectorate. Incumbency determines selection criteria to a higher extent in national elections than in the European Parliament elections, with the latter characterized by a higher level of intra-party competition for nominations. The work reveals new insights into the relationships between different electoral arenas.