Abstract
With the introduction of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure, by which European party families nominate lead candidates for the post of President of the European Commission for European elections, the European Parliament (EP) sought to raise voter awareness and engagement by personalizing the campaigns. This article studies candidate recognition with respect to Spitzenkandidaten, which is an important prerequisite in the study of personalization effects on voter behaviour. We use novel survey data collected in 10 European countries in the 2019 EP election campaign ( n = 17,027). The article focuses on the role of voters’ news exposure in various media and argues that news exposure is crucial for candidate recognition, but its effect is contingent upon the domestic campaign context. The article is the first to show that the campaign context matters to the extent that news exposure is particularly relevant in those domestic contexts in which Spitzenkandidaten were not previously present. In other campaign contexts additional news exposure adds little to the effect of news exposure on candidate recognition. The results have important implications for understanding EP election campaigns.
Highlights
The 2019 European Parliament (EP) election campaigns continued with the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure, which was first employed in 2014
We stacked the data (n = 119,189) and aligned candidate recognition with four additional control variables: (a) the propensity to vote (PTV) for the respective domestic party that is aligned with the European party family of each candidate (11-point scales, Online Appendix B), which is likely to be positively associated with candidate recognition (Gattermann and de Vreese, 2017); (b) a dummy indicating that several domestic parties are affiliated with a Spitzenkandidat’s party group (0 refers to one party or none); (c) the candidate itself; and (d) a dummy that considers whether a candidate had the same nationality as the respondents, which is likely to relate to higher levels of candidate recognition
This article sought to shed light on the role news exposure plays for candidate recognition against the background of the Spitzenkandidaten procedure employed in EP elections
Summary
The 2019 European Parliament (EP) election campaigns continued with the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure, which was first employed in 2014. We stacked the data (n = 119,189) and aligned candidate recognition with four additional control variables: (a) the propensity to vote (PTV) for the respective domestic party that is aligned with the European party family of each candidate (11-point scales, Online Appendix B), which is likely to be positively associated with candidate recognition (Gattermann and de Vreese, 2017); (b) a dummy indicating that several domestic parties are affiliated with a Spitzenkandidat’s party group (0 refers to one party or none); (c) the candidate itself; and (d) a dummy that considers whether a candidate had the same nationality as the respondents (own candidate), which is likely to relate to higher levels of candidate recognition.
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