Afraid of Europe? How Party Campaigns in the 2009 European Elections Affected the Vote

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.