This study investigates the impact of party campaigns on voting behaviour within the context of the 2009 European Parliamentary elections with a cross-national comparative research design. We, first, content analyzed domestic parties’ televised campaign ads and campaign posters in eleven EU member states. In a second step, this material was categorized as being either indicative of a ‘first-order’ campaign, i.e. focusing on European issues and actors, or ‘second-order’ campaign, i.e. focusing on national topics and actors (Franklin, 2004). In a next step, we tested the impact of the different campaign materials (representing positive/negative first- or second-order campaign material) on support for the EU, vote choice and turnout intention in an online-experiment in the week before the 2009 EP elections (N=4,020). We expect that first-order campaign material has more of an effect on subsequent EU evaluations, turnout intention and vote choice intention compared to second-order campaign material. Furthermore, we expect negative material to contribute to more negative subsequent EU evaluations as compared to positive material. With regard to turnout intention, we expect negative first-order campaign material to be more mobilizing than positive first-order campaign material and second-order campaign material. With regard to vote choice, we expect negative first-order campaign material to be more persuasive than positive first-order and second-order campaign material. In our analysis, we assess ‘threat perception’, i.e. the degree to which respondents are afraid of the future consequences of EU integration, as a potential mediator (Preacher et al., 2007). Our findings partially support our expectations. The distinction between first- and second-order campaign material did not show to make a difference. However, negative campaign material showed to result in higher threat perception as compared to positive campaign material. In turn, higher threat perception had a negative influence on EU support and did affect vote choice intention but not turnout intention.
