European Elections and Domestic Politics: Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future

Preface

Preface ElectionstotheEuropeanParliamentaredifferentfromelectionstonational 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 is that, although they are ostensibly about the composition of the European Parliament, other—domestic—factors are paramount in the motivations of the most important actors in the electoral process: voters, political parties, and mass media. This generates a number of questions about the ways in which European elections and domestic politics influence each other. These are the questions addressed by this book. Since 1979 European elections are held every five years in all member states of the European Union, they have been studied systematically by scholars interested in the process of European integration, and by political scientists and communication scientists who took advantage of the comparative laboratory that these elections provide. This book is the product of a group of such scholars, who since 1988 organized themselves in the European Elections Studies Group. Since 1989 this group conducted extensive studies of the European Parliament elections. These resulted in a great number of publications, including two major and integrative ‘flagship ’ publications. This volume builds upon these and constitutes the third of this series. The first of the two previous volumes is Choosing Europe? edited by van der Eijk and Franklin (1996). Using data from the European Election Studies 1989 and 1994 it investigated the electoral behavior of the citizens of the EU member states. It concluded that voters are sensitive to their (national) political contexts, yet also that, in spite of these different contexts, “the vii populations of the member-states of the European Union constitute a single electorate , and cannot meaningfully be considered as distinct electorates” (p. 404). The second volume in this series is Political representation and legitimacy in the European Union, edited by Schmitt and Thomassen (1999). On the basis of the European Election Study 1994 it focused on the quality of representative democracy in the European Union and concluded that, contrary to many pundits, the preconditions for legitimate and effective political representation are clearly present, although the realization of adequate representative democracy still leaves much to be desired. The current volume builds upon these two previous books. It is mainly based on data relating to the European elections of 1999 and compares these, where possible, to similar data from earlier elections to the European Parliament . Moreover, it not only looks into citizens (random samples of whom were interviewed), but also into the other major actors involved in representative democracy: political parties (which are investigated by way of the manifestos that they wrote for the European elections) and mass media (which are studied by way of a systematic content analysis of television news in the various countries of the EU). Although the empirical material on which this book is based covers the period through 1999, its significance is not limited to that period. This is particularly so because it is not primarily a book about the European elections of 1999, but rather an in-depth investigation of more general phenomena, the relevance of which far surpasses this specific election. This book is about the interplay between European elections and domestic politics, about the interactions between voters, political parties, and media, and about the commonalities (or lack thereof) of each of these actors across the member states of the European Union. For reasons that will be elaborated in this book, we have good reasons to believe that it is unlikely that the structural characteristics of these phenomena will change fundamentally in the foreseeable future. In fact, we expect most of these to remain relevant for many years to come. Therefore, the relevance of this volume extends wellbeyondtheperiodduringwhichmostofitsempiricalmaterialwascollected— just as still is the case for the two previous volumes referred to above. The focus of this third volume is on the ways in which European elections are connected to the national contexts of the member states, their domestic political arenas, and the political processes that unfold there. This connection is a two-way street. The domestic context shapes and influences much of the behavior of citizens , political parties, and mass media in European elections. It does so, however, against the backdrop of profound commonalities that re-affirm the conclusions from the earlier volumes, namely that a single European electorate exists and that viii Preface the conditions are fulfilled for...