European Voters Research Articles

The Spitzenkandidaten in the European Parliament Election Campaign Coverage 2014 in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom

Elections to the European Parliament are characterised by a steady decline in voter turnout. To tackle this problem, in 2014, several groups of the European Parliament nominated pan-European Spitzenkandidaten who were expected to personalise the elections and mobilise European voters. Based on this development, this study analyses the media coverage of the 2014 EP elections with special focus on the role of the Spitzenkandidaten. A quantitative content analysis of European election campaign coverage in the opinion leading newspapers of three influential EU member states, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom was carried out. The results show large candidate- and country-specific differences regarding the visibility and thematic coverage of the EP elections in general as well as the presentation of the Spitzenkandidaten. The Spitzenkandidaten were not very visible in either the German, French, or British newspaper coverage. With respect to the presence and media personalisation of the Spitzenkandidaten, the newspaper coverage of the EP election does not demonstrate any mobilising effect and thus does not reflect the high expectations the European Parliament attributed to the nomination of the Spitzenkandidaten.

European Sociopolitical Mentalities: Identifying Pro- and Antidemocratic Tendencies

ABSTRACTA sequel to an analysis of citizens' predispositions for democracy (Part I), this study focuses on larger units, shared ideologies. European ideologies were explored by secondary data analysis of European Values Study (EVS) wave 4, years 2008–2010, 44 countries, 73 questionnaire items, N = 63,281 respondents. The nature of the ideologies is inviting to cluster analysis approach as they tend to be described in terms of ‘patterned clusters’ and likened to an urban cacophony. We applied cluster analysis to reveal prevalent ideological patterns (pro- and antidemocratic tendencies) within the noise of attitudes, values, and behavioral tendencies of European voters and nonvoters. This time our unit was not an individual citizen but a more general unit, ‘an averaged electoral case’. Each major party and also ‘no party’, ‘other party’, and ‘DK/NA’ categories for each country were represented by an abstracted (non)voter with average opinions (using all 73 variables), producing N = 302 averaged electoral tendencies. These were subjected to hierarchical agglomerative cluster analysis. Resulting clusters partitioned Europe into three political regions: active democracy (the north-west; 41% of Europeans, 64.5% democratic), moderate democracy (southern and postcommunist Europe; 48% of Europeans, 21.7% democratic), passive democracy (south-east: Turkey, Romania, Albania, Northern Cyprus; 11% of Europeans, 9.6% democratic). This study thus provided a complementary perspective to the study from Part I (which manifested trans-nationally shared political mentalities of European citizens): European public ideologies manifested regional divides and confirmed the lack of internationally shared public sphere.

The messenger of inflation – how media change political competition

Voters do not like bad economic news, especially rising inflation rates. How voters learn about this news, not simply the news itself, can affect electoral behaviour. This article reports a study of media and electoral behaviour between 1960 and 2006 in 70 democratic states. It demonstrates that high inflation rates, combined with intense media coverage, resulted in more political competition and tight electoral races. Our detailed results show that European (EU-27) voters are more sensitive to television and radio coverage than they are to printed press coverage of negative economic news when compared with non-European electorates.

Competitive and Coherent? Profiling the Europarties in the 2009 European Parliament Elections

On the bases of the new EU Profiler data for the 2009 European Parliament elections, this work looks at two basic criteria to assess the representative potential of the EU party system: its competitiveness and the policy coherence of its parties. It is here argued that, if the national parties are successfully able to aggregate their programmes and agendas at the EU level, proposing different options to the European voters, the EU ‘democratic deficit' might not be as severe as it is often lamented. It is found that the Europarties, despite the enlargements towards Central and Eastern Europe, are sufficiently coherent and different to seek to fulfil an expressive, or representative, function. By selectively placing its focus on the ‘supply-side' of politics, this work shows that European voters could indeed make meaningful choices, which the Europarties might turn into concrete policies through their parliamentary activity.

Motivating the European voter: Parties, issues and campaigns in European Parliament elections

AbstractVoters behave differently in European Parliament (EP) elections compared to national elections because less is at stake in these ‘second‐order’ elections. While this explains the primary characteristic of EP elections, it has often led to a conflation of distinct motivations for changing behaviour – namely sincere and protest voting. By distinguishing these motivations, this article addresses the question of when and why voters alter their behaviour in EP elections. In addition, it argues that the degree of politicisation of the EU in the domestic debate shapes the extent to which voters rely on EU, rather than national, considerations. These propositions are tested in a multilevel analysis in 27 countries in the 2009 EP elections. The findings have important implications for understanding why voters change their behaviour between different types of elections.

‘Two Colours, One People’?

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, New Caledonian politics were dominated by one major party, the Union Calédonienne (UC), supported by the vast majority of Kanak voters and a crucial minority of European voters. In retrospect, the multicultural project of the UC under the rubric ‘two colours, one people’ can seem quite surprising, as it was elaborated less than ten years after the end of a particularly oppressive colonial era and three decades before the emergence of radical Kanak demands for decolonisation. This paper analyses the ambiguous relationships between the UC and New Caledonia's colonial heritage through a micro-historical sociology of the party in the rural commune of Koné (northwest coast) that draws on both archival research and interviews. With regard to both colonial and socio-economic cleavages, the paper retraces the individual and collective trajectories of UC militants and elected members of the mairie (municipal council), to gain a better understanding of the local electoral success of the party. On the scale of Koné, the UC relied in practice on a complex articulation between diverse social logics of political affiliation: across colonial frontiers, within and among Kanak communities, ‘little settlers’ (petits colons), merchants, mining workers, and ‘white’ (or not so ‘white’) local populations.

Managing globalization by managing Central and Eastern Europe: the EU's backyard as threat and opportunity

As European voters and politicians increasingly demanded in the 1990s that the European Union (EU) ‘manage’ globalization, managing the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe (CE) emerged as an important precursor. To richer areas like the old EU-15, poor areas next door often appear as both threat and opportunity. Some EU-15 actors – mostly corporations, but also many European liberals – saw in CE a chance for new markets, new workers and new investment opportunities for the core EU-15 economies. They tried to codify new conditions of production and sale that they thought beneficial, but other EU-15 actors worried about competition from CE on capital, labor and product markets. The fearful – mostly EU-15 states and the EU itself but sometimes firms headquartered in the EU-15 – acted to try to minimize these potential threats. I show that, as a broad proposition, actors motivated by the threats seem to have shaped conditions more than those motivated by opportunity. Data from financial flows, trade in goods and services, and labor migration illustrate this central point. I conclude with speculations on how this pattern is affected by the economic downturn after 2008.

Is a Federal European Constitution for an Enlarged European Union Necessary? Some Preliminary Suggestions Using Public Choice Analysis

In order to guarantee a further successful functioning of the enlarged European Union, a Federal European Constitution is proposed. Six basic elements of a future European federal constitution are developed: the European commission should be turned into a European government and the European legislation should consist of a two chamber system with full responsibility over all federal items. Three further key elements are the subsidiarity principle, federalism and the secession right, which are best suited to limiting the domain of the central European authority to which certain tasks are given, such as defense, foreign and environmental policy. Another important feature is direct democracy, which provides the possibility for European voters to participate actively in the political decision making, to break political and interest group cartels, and to prevent an unwanted shifting of responsibilities from EU member states to the European federal level.

The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies

The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies

A Constitution for Europe

A comprehensive analysis that explains why voters in the Netherlands and France rejected the Constitution for Europe in recent referenda. In an insightful secondary analysis that compares the Philadelphia Convention of 1787 with the Brussels Convention that began in 2002 in terms of procedure and substance, the author introduces another telling dimension that helps to explain why the U.S. Constitution was ratified and why the Constitution for Europe was judged to be a lost cause once specific European voters rejected it.

Is a Federal European Constitution for an Enlarged European Union Necessary? Some Preliminary Suggestions using Public Choice Analysis

In order to guarantee a further successful functioning of the enlarged European Union a Federal European Constitution is proposed. Six basic elements of a future European federal constitution are developed: the European commission should be turned into a European government and the European legislation should consist of a two chamber system with full responsibility over all federal items. Three further key elements are the subsidiarity principle, federalism and the secession right, which are best suited to limiting the domain of the central European authority to which certain tasks are given, such as defense, foreign and environmental policy. Another important feature is direct democracy, which provides the possibility for European voters to participate actively in political decision making, to break political and interest group cartels, and to prevent an unwanted shifting of responsibilities from EU member states to the European federal level.

Efficiency and Equality in the Labour Market

This paper discusses the costs and benefits of welfare state intervention in the labour market, and argues that many forms of intervention can be justified for ef ficiency reasons. The paper reviews recent evidence on income inequality and income mobility , and it discusses labour market reforms that may improve efficiency without violati ng European voters' preference for equality.

The Italian Welfare System in the European Context

The deep changes that have taken place over the past twenty years in the labor market, demographics, and social disparities have led European countries to reorganize their welfare systems in order to respond more effectively to these challenges. Although several of the European Union's core documents affirm social protection as a fundamental component of European society since it ensures political stability, social cohesion and economic progress, there is significant evidence that today's European countries will follow a United States approach of “minimal social protection” especially in the current climate of liberal ideologies and global market pressures. The erosion of historical commitments to social protection is aided by the fact that a significant number of European voters appear to favor tax reductions and don't seem to make the connection between low taxes and low social services and infrastructure spending. After a brief description of the Italian welfare system, this paper discusses Italy's reforms of the 1990s and reaches the conclusion that actual and planned reforms are paving the way for a residual model of welfare and social protection. It is further argued that a constant re-examination and restructuring of the welfare system is necessary in order to improve its effectiveness in reaching defined goals while at the same time responding to changing economic conditions. However, restructuring efforts should focus on improvements in internal efficiency, rather than on a general reductions of social expenditures. In fact, it is argued that the reduction of social expenditure in itself is neither a necessary consequence of globalization and European unification nor a necessary strategy to remain competitive. It is instead a reflection of cultural leanings and political choices.

Voter Perceptions and Party Strategies: An Empirical Approach

Over thirty years ago Duverger set a paradox which still stands. find ourselves in a vicious circle: a general theory of parties will eventually be constructed only upon the preliminary work of many profound studies, but these studies cannot be truly profound so long as there exists no general theory of I In large part the academic attack on this problem has been piecemeal; very few authors have attempted to consider a general theory of parties. Those who have attempted such a study-and who we will consider in a moment-have tended to focus upon party competition as the main problem to be attacked. Even here, however, the approach has been piecemeal in that the majority of writers on party competition only inadequately consider the important other half of the coin, namely, electoral behavior. In this paper we seek to examine a more complete conception of party competition. The plan of attack is to develop an explicit model of voting behavior and a set of consequences for party behavior. After this we turn to empirical evidence of both the voting model and party behavior. We begin, however, by elaborating upon our contention that inadequate attention to voters has been a downfall of models of party competition. In order to make this task manageable, we will divide the literature somewhat arbitrarily into formal and nonformal or comparativist, beginning our discussion with the latter. To a fairly large extent the traditional comparativist models of party competition have been grounded in implicit, and often idiosyncratic, models of voting behavior, the general impact of which is to build up a picture of political parties as either being unable to move policy positions or being able to move almost at will. A few examples will serve to illustrate this point. First let us examine those who see parties as being able to move freely throughout a policy space. The earliest examples of this view are expressed by Michels and Kirchheimer who see the old socialist or class-mass parties as being able to abandon their old, radical positions and move to become centrist or catch-all parties.2 Objections to this sell out are seen to come mainly from within the party organizations themselves and not from the voters. That is to say, for example, Socialist and Communist parties, once they manage to overcome internal opposition, can move to become centrist parties with little or no electoral penalty, a picture that is clearly at odds with the difficulties postwar Communist parties have experienced in selling their belief in the parliamentary road to socialism to European voters.

PARTY ATTACHMENT AND PARTY CHOICE IN THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS OF JUNE 1989: A cross-national comparative analysis of the post-electoral surveys of the European Voters Study 1989

PARTY ATTACHMENT AND PARTY CHOICE IN THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS OF JUNE 1989: A cross-national comparative analysis of the post-electoral surveys of the European Voters Study 1989

Comparative economic assessments and the endogeneity of left/right self placement: A research note

Abstract. Previous survey level research on attitudes towards the economy among European voters has tended to focus on the short‐term implications of these attitudes, relating them to vote choice or executive popularity. In this paper we seek to examine the relationships between economic assessments and more fundamental aspects of voter attitudes. More concretely, we examine the links between ideology and economic information, arguing that they are interdependent to the exctent that they can be seen to exist within a reciprocal relationship. In the wake of Kramer, we approach this problem from a comparative perspective, and find that the hypothesised reciprocal relationship is well supported by the statistical evidence.

Class, territory and party: political change in Britain, 1945–1974

Abstract. Two theoretical traditions in the study of European voter alignments emphasize alternatively class and territorial structuring of mass politics. Until the 1970′s the developmental paradigm resting on the class‐based, stable polity model of the 1945–1970 period ruled the research agenda. The weakening of party alignments in the 1970′s and the introduction of the competing territorial paradigm challenged the dominant model. This research tests both models in Britain against the supposed stability of the 1945–1970 period. The results demonstrate that while the developmental model fits Britain as a whole quite well, the introduction of regional polity analysis exposes considerable instability of voter and party alignments, uneven class development and the mobilization of cultural cleavages, dynamics which undergird the politics of cultural defence and find expression in the nationalist parties in the 1970′s. In questioning the assumed stability of the 1945–1970 period the findings challenge the foundations of the current debates on realignment in Britain.

The European Voter: Popular Responses to the First Community Election

The European Voter: Popular Responses to the First Community Election