Content Emptiness, Low Media Coverage, Exhausted Parties and Indifferent Voters: An Invisible 2014 European Parliamentary Election Campaign in the Czech Republic

Abstract

It was in 1983 that one of the earliest comparative European studies on election campaigning was published. The study was initiated by Jay Blumler, and the authors included in the edited volume analysed the 1979 European Parliament (EP) election campaign (see Blumler 1983). Fifteen contributors focused on campaigning, and especially on the role of television broadcasting, in all the nine European Community member states in the 1979 EP elections. One of the leading ideas was that European elections, as a simultaneous and common event, offered a unique opportunity for a cross-national comparative analysis of campaigning in Western European democracies. Since then, analyses of European elections campaigning have been an important and integral part of both political communication and European election studies.