Europeanisation of Slovak Parties’ Programmatic Documents for EP Elections: A Drop in the Bucket, or a Light at the End of the Tunnel?

Abstract

Abstract Elections to the European Parliament fall within the category of second-order elections. Because there is less at stake in these types of contests voters behave differently when casting votes. But the question remains: do political parties also perceive that there is less at stake in these elections and behave differently than in national first-order elections? This paper conducts a content analysis, within a comparative framework, of selected Slovak political parties’ programmatic documents for EP elections to explicitly link the SOE model to independent behaviour of political parties. The results show that Slovak parties’ Euromanifestos feature an apparent degree of Europeanisation and exhibited only limited second-order characteristics. Consequently, these findings are discussed in the light of relevant literature.