European Elections and Domestic Politics

Cover

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TItle Page, Copyright

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Contents

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pp. v-vi

Preface

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pp. vii-ix

Elections to the European Parliament are different from elections to national legislative or executive offices. They are often referred to as second-order national elections, and this book elaborates why this is the case and discusses some of its consequences. One of the characteristics of these elections ...

Contributors

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pp. xi-xiv

Stefano Bartolini is currently Director of the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute, Florence. Previously he was a professor at the Universities of Bologna, Florence, Trieste, Geneva, and at the European University Institute. In 1990 he was awarded the Stein Rokkan ...

Introduction Electoral politics in the European Union and the 2004 enlargement

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pp. 1-12

The 2004 enlargement of the European Union is larger and more ambitious than each of the previous ones. Of the ten new member states, only one (Malta) is a relatively well-established and problem-free democracy, but it is by far the smallest of the new members. Of the rest, Cyprus still struggles ...

1. Effects of space and time on turnout in European Parliament elections

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pp. 13-31

The idea that turnout responds to levels of public esteem for democratic institutions is deep seated and recurrent. Though it has been argued (Franklin 1999, 2004; Franklin, van der Eijk, and Oppenhuis 1996) that turnout reflects nothing of the sort—certainly not unless one first controls for other ...

2. European elections as counterfactual national elections

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pp. 32-50

European Parliament (EP) elections are not national parliamentary (NP) elections, yet it is tempting to speculate about the consequences of EP election outcomes as if they were national parliamentary elections. Indeed, politicians and the media often discuss the outcomes of the European elections ...

3. European Parliament elections and losses by governing parties

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pp. 51-72

The fifth set of elections to the European Parliament in 2004 saw twenty-five countries sending representatives to the parliament in Brussels and Strasbourg, more than twice the number who participated in the first elections in 1979. On the face of it this presents anyone wishing to predict what ...

4. Comparing the views of parties and voters in the 1999 election to the European Parliament

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pp. 73-93

The increasing transfer of policy-making powers from the member states to the European Union during the past decades has generated relatively little political controversy in most of the member states. The exceptions to this general pattern—particularly Denmark and Britain, to some extent ...

5. Locating support for European integration

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pp. 94-115

Until the 1990s the European project has been largely elite driven. As long as the European Union was mainly an economic union, the (potential) issue of whether further European integration was desirable was hardly politicized. To be sure, there were often protests against European policies, ...

6. The media and European Parliament elections: Second-rate coverage of a second-order event?

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pp. 116-130

European elections are often referred to as second-order national elections. Following the first elections for the European Parliament in 1979, Reif and Schmitt (1980) asserted that European elections are not essentially about ‘Euro-politics’ but about national, domestic politics. As a result ...

7. Media effects on attitudes toward European integration

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pp. 131-144

The previous chapter described patterns of media coverage of the 1999 European election campaign. This chapter deals with the effects of this coverage on citizens’ opinions about the EU. More specifically, the chapter investigates whether the coverage affects (a) the perceived importance of ...

8. Non-voting in European Parliament elections and support for European integration

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pp. 145-167

Participation in European Parliament elections is low and has been so since the first of these elections in 1979. While considerable research effort has been invested to explore the causes of the meager turnout in European Parliament elections, the results so far are somewhat inconclusive. ...

9. EU support and party choice

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pp. 168-188

Orientations toward European integration and toward the European Union figure prominently in many chapters of this volume. Chapter 4 focused on parties’ orientations toward European integration, and on voters’ perceptions thereof. Chapter 5 analyzed differences in supportive attitudes ...

10. The sleeping giant: Potential for political mobilization of disaffection with European integration

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pp. 189-208

Progress toward European Unity has been characterized as occurring in the context of a high degree of ‘permissive consensus’ (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). Institutions have been created, policies have been enacted, and sovereignty has effectively been transferred to European institutions with ...

11. Prospects for electoral change

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pp. 209-225

European elections provide potentially important prospects for electoral change, and thus for affecting the subsequent development of domestic politics. This may seem like a somewhat surprising perspective on elections that are mainly characterized by a low intensity of campaigning, by ...

12. European elections, domestic politics, and European integration

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pp. 226-261

European elections provide unique opportunities for studying the complex interactions between elites and citizens in the interrelated spheres of domestic and European politics, partially because these elections link domestic and European politics. While their nature as second-order national ...

Postscript The research agenda beyond the 2004 European elections

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pp. 262-272

While this volume, which analyzes European elections through 1999, was being finished, new elections to the European Parliament were held in June 2004. As always since 1989, the 2004 elections were accompanied by largescale collecting of empirical information on voters, media, and parties.¹ ...

Appendix A The voter study

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pp. 273-276

The European Election Study (EES) 1999 comprises a voter study consisting of surveys of representative samples of the electorates of the then fifteen member states of the European Union: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, ...

Appendix B The media study

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pp. 277-282

Research on television news has shown that the election coverage tends to cluster shortly before Election Day, and European election content is mainly broadcast in the main evening news (see Blumler 1983; Reiser 1994). Rather than short bulletins or current affairs programs, television news ...

Appendix C Euromanifesto content

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pp. 283-285

The party manifestos issued on the occasions of elections to the European Parliament have been collected and analyzed for all parties ever represented in the EP. Although Euromanifestos have been collected for the complete period from 1979 to 2004, analyses presented in this book exclusively rely on the 1999 ...

Appendix D Election results, quasi-switching and turnout effects

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pp. 286-294

This appendix contains country tables reporting the outcomes of the 1994 and 1999 European Parliament elections as well as the results of counterfactual national elections, which form the bases for the analyses of chapter 2. For each party in the different countries, the following figures are reported: ...

References

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pp. 295-312

Author Index

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pp. 313-316

Subject Index

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pp. 317-320