Issues that mobilize Europe. The role of key policy issues for voter turnout in the 2019 European Parliament election

Daniela Braun,Constantin Schäfer

doi:10.1177/14651165211040337

Daniela Braun, Constantin Schäfer

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1177/14651165211040337

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Abstract

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.

Highlights

After a decade during which the European Union (EU) has been riddled by a multifaceted crisis and increased politicization, the 2019 election to the European Parliament (EP) was accompanied by the dictum that the future of Europe is at stake (Braun, 2021; Treib, 2021)
The surprising increase in EU-wide voter turnout in the 2019 EP election has been largely attributed to increased political conflicts over key European issues and a greater degree of politicization in these elections
We investigated whether European citizens were mobilized through four major policy issues in the 2019 EP election: the economy, environment/climate change, immigration, and European integration itself

Summary

Introduction

After a decade during which the European Union (EU) has been riddled by a multifaceted crisis and increased politicization, the 2019 election to the European Parliament (EP) was accompanied by the dictum that the future of Europe is at stake (Braun, 2021; Treib, 2021). First, that EU citizens showed a higher tendency to participate in the 2019 European election when they attributed a greater relevance to one or more of these issues, meaning that they found an issue to be salient or held a rather extreme opinion on a policy issue. Besides this inductive approach of identifying the most relevant policy issues from survey data, we provide theoretical arguments for our interest in the mobilizing role of four main issues: the economy, immigration, environment/climate change, and European integration.

Results

Conclusion