Law and Justice in the European Parliament Elections 2004–2024

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.

European Parliament elections are typically perceived as less significant (second-order) than parliamentary or presidential elections (first-order). The 2019 European Parliament elections in Poland saw the highest voter turnout of any election to date. In this context, it seems important to test the concept of Second-Order Election in relation to electios in Poland. This article aims to analyze the European Parliament elections in the context of the Second-Order Election concept's assumptions. The analysis included political party documents, party leaders' speeches, statistical data, press articles, and academic studies. The research found that some of the Second-Order Election concept's assumptions were confirmed, while others were disproved.

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.

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.

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.

The European Parliament (EP) elections, held in Poland on 25 May 2014, were the first nationwide elections since October 2011. They also opened a new, 18-month election period, including the local government elections (November 2014), presidential election (May 2015) and parliament elections (October 2015). Therefore, the main parties in the political scene treated them very seriously, seeing them as a chance to determine their real political power. Election rivalry proceeded on two different levels. For Civic Platform [Platforma Obywatelsk: PO] and for Law and Justice [Prawo i Sprawiedliwośc: PiS], winning this election was a matter of prestige. The main party of the governing coalition wanted to confirm their dominance, despite the defeat in the 2013 by-elections and falling support in the polls. For Law and Justice, after losing six elections in a row, victory in the EP elections was supposed to be the first step towards regaining power in Poland. For other Polish political parties these elections were a fight for survival. The Democratic Left Alliance [Sojusz Lewicy Demokratycznej: SLD]—entering these elections in a coalition with another left-wing party, not present in the Polish parliament, Labour United [Unia Pracy: UP], and the Polish People’s Party [Polskie Stronnictwo Ludowe: PSL], wanted to maintain their status among the parties that safely exceed the electoral threshold. However, for new political initiatives, such as the centre-left coalition Europe Plus–Your Movement (including former SLD Members of the EP, in conflict with their old party and Janusz Palikot’s party), Solidarity Poland (politicians previously connected with Law and Justice, with their leader Zbigniew Ziobro, former justice minister in Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s government), Poland Together, New Right and the National Movement, the EP elections were a chance to emerge onto the Polish political scene.

In the European Parliament elections, the incumbent Italian Prime Minister and leader of the political party «Brothers of Italy», Giorgia Meloni, was personally leading her party’s list in all constituencies and urged citizens to vote for her if they approve of her cabinet’s policies. However, being a vivid example of a populist and personalized party, «Brothers of Italy» in this election campaign bet not only on the image of Meloni herself, but also on a new strategy of building relations with the European Union. The aim of this article is a comparative analysis of the election programs of the ruling Italian party «Brothers of Italy» for national and European elections held over the last five years. Identifying and comparing the key priorities around which these program documents were built allowed us to trace the influence of the leftist agenda on the political course of «Brothers of Italy», which is considered center-right, as well as the evolution of the party’s strategy towards the European Union – from a Eurosceptic to a Eurorealist paradigm. With the ambitious goal of repeating the success of 2022 now at the supranational level, «Brothers of Italy» aim to create a broad center-right majority in the European Parliament and send the left into opposition, but this raises the question of how far the ruling Italian coalition will be able to maintain its unity depending on the outcome of the European elections.

Based on findings from the literature on campaign effects on the one hand, and the literature on European Parliament elections on the other, we propose a model of European Parliamentary elections in which the campaign shift the calculus of electoral support, making differences in national political allegiances less important and attitudes about the European project more important by informing voters of and getting them interested in European politics. In effect, we argue that the political campaign leading up to the election makes European Parliament elections less second order. While previous studies have demonstrated that EU issues can matter for voting behavior in European Parliament elections, existing research has drawn on post-election surveys that do not enable us to capture campaign effects. Our contribution is to assess the impact of a campaign by utilizing a rolling cross-sectional survey that enables us to track how voters were affected by the campaign. Our findings show that campaigns do have an effect on European Parliament election outcomes, in that they provide information that enables voters to make decisions based on their attitude on European issues, making voter decision-making more dominated by EU issue voting.

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.

Are European Parliament (EP) elections still second-order? In this article, we test the classical model at the individual level in contrast to an alternative ‘Europe matters’ model, by investigating the relative importance of domestic vs. European Union (EU)-related issues among voter-level determinants of aggregate second-order effects, that is, individual party change. We do so by relying on an original, CAWI pre-electoral survey featuring a distinctively large (30) number of both domestic and EU-related, positional and valence issues, with issue attitudes measured according to the innovative ICCP scheme (De Sio and Lachat 2020) which includes issue positions, issue priorities and respondents' assessment of party credibility on both positional and valence goals. Leveraging the concept of ‘normal vote’, we estimate multivariate models of electoral defections from normal voting separately for general and European elections, based on issue party credibility. This allows us to assess: (a) the distinctiveness of the two electoral arenas in terms of issue content; and (b) the relative impact of EU-related and domestic issues on defections of Italian voters. Our findings show that although second-order effects are still relevant in accounting for results in EP elections, vote choice in the latter is also partly due to specific effects of certain policy issues, including some related to the European dimension. This indicates that EP elections have their own political content, for which Europe matters even after controlling for the importance that EU-related issues have acquired in national elections.

The chapter aims to contribute to a better and more nuanced understanding of citizenship practices in peripheral regions of Central and Eastern Europe, taking into account local specificities of European Parliament elections and the voices of young people. It is based on a quantitative analysis of voter turnout data and a qualitative analysis of original material collected in focus groups by the Leipzig Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence on the European Union and Its Rural Peripheries in East Central Europe, and it uses a new index of peripherality. For the 2019 European Parliament elections, the chapter examines whether a particular pattern of turnout can be discerned in peripheral areas (NUTS 3 regions) in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, and Romania. It then analyses how the next generation of potential voters in peripheral regions view the European elections and what tools they suggest to increase turnout. Finally, recommendations are made for future research on participation and education in the context of European elections in East Central Europe.

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.

From Political Fringe to Political Mainstream: The Front National and the 2014 Municipal and European Elections in France

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.

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.