A startling tale with a ‘no-plot’ twist: electoral abstention in Italy at the 2024 European parliament elections

The purpose of the article is to diagnose the causes of the increased interest shown by Poles in the European parliamentary election in 2019. From 2014 to 2019, Poles’ participation in elections to the European Parliament went up from 23.83% to 45.68%. Drawing on Europe salience theory and second-order election theory, I set out to determine whether changes in Poles’ attitudes towards the European Union led to this almost twofold increase in turnout from 2014 to 2019, or whether this trend was mainly attributable to the election cycle, that is, the coincidence in 2019 of both European and domestic parliamentary elections. My research involved an analysis of survey data (CBOS, Eurobarometr), statistical data, and the course of the European parliamentary election campaign. During the analysis, it turned out that in the years 2014–2019 there were no significant changes in how the European Union and its institutions were perceived by Poles that could explain the dramatic increase in interest in the European election. What had the greatest impact on voter behaviour was the fact that the European election was held just several months before an election to the Polish parliament. The Polish political parties treated the European election in May as a test of support in the nation election to be held in the autumn – as a ‘quasi-first round.’ The European election campaign was heavily covered by the media, and focused on domestic issues (building up Poland’s welfare state). The ruling party’s announcement of numerous social reforms and a desire to influence the result of the ‘May round’ mobilised an above-average number of Poles to take an active part in the European election.

The resurgence of populist radical right parties in European democracies has been one of the most scrutinized and thoroughly documented political phenomena in the past four decades. So far, the bulk of the existing comparative research on populist radical right parties has been mainly concerned with first-order elections in Western Europe, less so with European elections. European integration and Euroscepticism are crucial features of the populist radical right however. Most parties of the populist radical right take a negative stance towards the European Union, and the European Parliament is also an arena that allows if not encourages cross-national co-operation. This chapter examines populist radical parties in European elections across all Western and Eastern member states, factors of variation in their electoral support and how European elections are linked to the national election cycle. Based upon Mudde's (2007) definition of the populist radical right, this chapter suggests a brief account of the presence of this party family in European parliament since 1979, together with a political mapping of its location in the collaborative space within the European arena. The second section looks more specifically at the status and role of EP elections within the national election cycle, and addresses the issue of regularity and change in the existing inter-relations between European and national first-order elections across EU-member states.

The present contribution to the scholarly knowledge about European Parliament (EP) elections essentially assembles analyses of the data of the 2004 European Election Study. Due to the very nature of large‐scale cross‐national comparative survey research, it will only be published shortly after the 2009 European Parliament election. As it would certainly be inadequate to ignore the fact that another European election took place just before publication, this introduction to the analyses that follow will start out with a first inspection of the results of this most recent European election—the election of the members of the European Parliament in June 2009. The main question we will be asking is about the persistence of the ‘second‐order’ character of these elections: are the 2009 European Parliament election results in line with our expectations about European Parliament elections as second‐order national elections as laid out originally by Reif and Schmitt (1980) and restated and refined in a large number of subsequent publications? The second part of this introduction will then go on and do what every introduction does: briefly present the contributions that follow.

The paper investigates women's representation in the European Parliament delegations of the new member states by bringing together three distinct strands of scholarship: the second-order elections model, feminist theories of candidate recruitment and the literature on party positions on European integration. It tests three hypotheses explaining women's selection as candidates in European elections: the impact of electoral systems; the impact of political parties’ left–right placement and the impact of party positions on European integration. The key finding is that gendered patterns of candidate recruitment in the new member states are best explained as a function of political parties’ positions on European integration, with electoral systems and left–right placement having only a limited impact on the selection of women candidates.

In the new EU member states, the European Parliament elections in June 2004 were anticipated with particular anxiety because of the role of anti-EU, nationalist, and extreme right-wing parties, which in some countries had scored signifi cant electoral successes in the recent past. But also in some of the old member states, the radical right was watched closely, in particular, after the French Front National's historic performance in the 2002 presidential election. Since the radical right feeds on the economic and social crisis and feelings of anxiety raised by EU integration, by globalization, and by anti-establishment feelings, many observers expected a general rise in support for these parties, especially in light of the growing complexity of the expanded EU. This article analyzes the electoral outcome for the radical right in the 2004 elections and discusses country-specifi c characteristics as well as regional patterns. It also looks at the role the radical right played, if any, in the votes on the new EU constitution in various member states. The article shows that, regarding the radical right, the European elections proved to be surprisingly unsurprising. Clearly, EU membership was not the only issue involved. Rather, larger issues of national identity, the strength of nationalist traditions, and some particular features superseded narrow foreign policy concerns and explain, more or less, the electoral success achieved by the radical right. Compared to the EU elections, the referenda on the EU constitution in several member states provided little to no opportunities for the radical right.

This article investigates the differences between candidate turnover at national legislative and European Parliament elections. Multilevel analysis is applied on original data containing 2754 electoral lists, clustered within 79 political parties, within 48 national and European elections. These comparative data allow (1) to test hypotheses on second-order EU elections within the context of electoral recruitment and (2) to measure the effect of systemic turnover drivers, which in turn may differ for EP elections. As such, this paper builds further on the emerging literature on candidate renewal by offering a comparative perspective and understanding the particular dynamic for EP elections. Results suggest that candidate turnover is lower at EP elections. Moreover, the effects of turnover drivers differ at EP elections: candidate turnover is lower on lists of fringe parties at the European level and elections with higher electoral volatility are characterised by higher candidate turnover, particularly at European elections.

European parliamentary elections are the defining event for political participation in the European Union (EU). Little, however, is known about how recent European parliamentary election campaigns are covered in television news, the most important source of information for most Europeans. We analyzed the main evening television news in 14 EU countries over the last 2 weeks before the 1999 European parliamentary elections (5,477 stories in total). Our results show considerable variation among the EU countries in the amount of coverage devoted to the European election campaign and the visibility given to EU representatives. Using multivariate analyses, we establish that there is more coverage of the European elections on (a) public broadcasting channels, (b) when elite opinion about the EU is polarized, and (c) when citizens are dissatisfied with their national governments. We also find that EU representatives are less visible in the news as a country participates in more European elections. The study provides a baseline for assessing the role and impact of news in future parliamentary elections and offers an explanatory approach to the study of news content.

Political parties seek information about public preferences to determine how much they need to change their policies as elections approach. We argue that opposition parties can use European parliamentary election results to inform themselves about public preferences. When opposition parties lose votes at the European level, they can use this information to infer that public opinion has shifted away from the party and change their national policy strategies. We also argue that not all European elections are the same and that parties should be more responsive to those European elections that are more informative about public preferences. Empirical results from 14 European Union (EU) member countries show that opposition parties use European election results and change their positions (a) when the turnout levels between national and European elections are similar and (b) when the European election is close in time to the upcoming national election.

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.

It is now commonplace to criticise the failings of Westminster’s ‘political class’. One part of this criticism regards the limited extent to which Westminster politicians reflect the social background of the voting population. Each party has addressed the problem in different ways, with Labour more likely to focus on the representation of women and the Conservatives on people with ‘proper jobs’ before election.1 Devolved and European elections have provided new opportunities for parties: Labour’s push for more elected women has been relatively effective in the Scottish, Welsh and European elections; and, before UKIP made significant gains in European Parliament elections in 2014, it promised candidates who were ‘not career politicians’. Yet, overall, new levels of elected representation have not produced a distinctive ‘political class’. There is still a common pattern of professionalisation across devolved, Westminster and European parliaments, in which elected politicians have often similar kinds of education and employment background, and generally struggle to mirror the social background of their populations.

Throughout the European Parliament’s nearly forty years of existence, electoral turnout in European parliamentary elections has consistently been lower than electoral turnout in the national elections of the member states. This is particularly the case for the majority of states in Eastern Europe where turnout in European elections has resulted in low electoral participation of eligible voters. Focusing on the 2014 election to the European Parliament, we highlight that low election-specific knowledge contributes to these low participation rates. In more detail, we rely on name recognition of the main candidates of the three main party groups, and show that knowledge of these candidates is more than twice as high in Western Europe as in Eastern Europe. Second, we illustrate that these low knowledge levels in the East also help explain the larger turnout gap between national and European elections in the East.

In light of the unexpectedly high turnout in the 2019 European Parliament election, we explore how major transnational policy issues mobilize voters in European electoral contests. Based on the analysis of two data sets, the Eurobarometer post-election survey and the RECONNECT panel survey, we make three important observations. First, European citizens show a higher tendency to participate in European Parliament elections when they attribute greater importance to the issues ‘climate change and environment’, ‘economy and growth’, and ‘immigration’. Second, having a more extreme opinion on the issue of ‘European integration’ increases people's likelihood to vote in European elections. Third, the mobilizing effect of personal issue importance is enhanced by the systemic salience that the respective policy issue has during the election campaign. These findings show the relevance of issue mobilization in European Parliament elections as well as its context-dependent nature.

The European Parliament elections in June 2004 coincided with local elections in many parts of England. In four regions of the country these elections were conducted entirely by postal ballots; in four other regions traditional methods of polling were used. Overall turnout was higher where all-postal voting was in place, but having local in addition to European elections made an independent and significant contribution to the level of electoral participation in all postal and non-postal regions alike. The pattern of party choice at the two types of contest also varied considerably. The three major political parties together took a much larger share of the overall vote at the local than at the European elections, and each independently ‘lost’ a sizeable number of its local votes to smaller parties. Aggregate level analysis suggests that voters assess the importance of electoral contests along a continuum and, in Britain in 2004 at least, treated local elections as less ‘second-order’ than pan-European ones.

The succession of Jean-Marie Le Pen by his daughter Marine Le Pen as president of the Front National (FN) in January 2011 heralded a significant strategic shift in the party’s development. In terms of its overarching political objective, the FN has moved from playing its historical spoiler role as an anti-system protest party to recasting itself as a mainstream political formation interested in exercising political power. In order to secure this objective, the FN under Marine Le Pen has adopted a two-pronged discursive and organizational approach. At a discursive level, the FN has toned down the racialized anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic rhetoric that characterized it in the past and instead chosen to couch its rejection of immigration in a broader, more conceptually neutral opposition to neoliberal globalization. The central element underpinning this discursive aggiornamento has been the rejection of the European Union, which is presented as an institutional stalking horse for the latter, conjoined with an avowedly Gaullist reaffirmation of France’s economic and political sovereignty. While the ‘UMPS’ (an acronym combining the initials of the principal center-right and -left parties in France) is busy facilitating Europe’s neo-liberal economic integration, so this new line goes, the FN erects itself as the sole authentic partisan opponent of this project and defender of its sectoral victims. At an organizational level, the FN has attempted to balance its top-heavy party structure built around a charismatic leader in favor of establishing a grassroots structure geared to responding to local concerns. Specifically, it is attempting to develop — much like the French Communist Party in the 1950’s and 1960’s — a clientelistic network to anchor its municipal electoral implantation. In turn, this Frontisme municipal is designed to strengthen the FN’s parliamentary representation at the mainstream parties’ expense. Thus, through both its discursive aggiornamento and new emphasis on local organizing, the party hopes to translate its status as the third political force in the country following the 2012 presidential elections into concrete electoral gains. This would allow it to more directly shape national policy and ultimately aspire to exercising power in its own right. The municipal and European parliamentary elections respectively scheduled for March and May 2014 stand to provide a sterling empirical test of the electoral effectiveness of the FN’s strategic reorientation under Marine Le Pen. The former will gauge the FN’s organizational gambit to wrest local political control from the mainstream parties, while the latter will measure the electoral resonance of its anti-European discourse. On a backdrop of generalized socioeconomic crisis, this paper shall analyze the FN’s performance in the 2014 municipal and European parliamentary elections from the standpoint of discourse and organization as essential factors of political supply. First, it will assess what the electoral results bode for the FN’s positioning and status within the French party system, chiefly whether they signal the party’s ‘breakout’ from the political fringe to the political mainstream. In turn, it will consider the broader lessons and implications this case holds for other radical right-wing parties in Europe.

Both freedom of movement and voting in European elections are fundamental citizenship rights at the heart of European integration. Ideally, EU citizens should be able to exercise both rights simultaneously. Yet, in practice, tensions exist between the two: Despite their strong emotional attachment to the European Union, EU citizens living outside their country of citizenship have a reduced likelihood to vote in European elections, even when they reside within the EU. This article demonstrates this pattern empirically for German emigrants in the 2019 European Parliament election, based on data from the German Emigration and Remigration Panel Study (GERPS). This survey is unique in that it covers both mobile German citizens who currently live abroad and those who have lived abroad, but have recently returned to Germany. Self-reported turnout was significantly reduced among those currently living abroad. Bureaucratic hurdles (including early opt-in registration deadlines, complex registration procedures, and tedious access to ballot) are identified as a key explanation for the decreased participation. These findings seem to contradict basic democratic principles and could have political implications: Since there are more than eleven million mobile EU citizens who are eligible to vote, reduced turnout among this group could affect election outcomes.