Are European Election Campaigns Europeanized? The Case of the Party of European Socialists in 2009

Abstract

In the past, European election campaigns have been fought primarily at national level, organized and led by national parties. The European political parties had neither the financial nor the organizational means to lead pan‐European election campaigns. The June 2009 elections, however, highlighted a different and potentially significant trend: new EU regulations provided for the direct financing of European political parties, allowing them to campaign directly in the elections. It is argued that these developments could lead to the Europeanization of European elections campaigns. This article applies the concept of Europeanization to the election campaigns of the Party of European Socialists and three of its member parties: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, creating an ideal‐type model of Europeanization. It concludes that in the three cases Europeanization is still in its infancy.

Representation of Women in Second-order Elections: The Czech Republic and Slovakia Compared

“…1 An important shortcoming of the SOE model lies in its primary focus on sophisticated strategies of voters. The model does not involve an explicit link to independent actions of the rest of the electoral circle -the media and the political parties -despite the findings of many studies showing that (1) parties allocate fewer resources for campaigns in SOEs than in first-order contests (Hertner, 2011;Maier & Tenscher, 2009); and (2) EP election campaigns are of low intensity and are dominated by national issues (de Vreese, 2009;Irwin, 1995). Moreover, European elections are consistently found not to be very visible in national television news and there is little doubt that the media find them less interesting than national FOEs (de Vreese et al, 2006;Kovár, 2010).…”

Governance, Europarties and the challenge of democratic representation in the EU: A case study of the Party of European Socialists

“…To try and counter this, Europarties are exploring novel forms of party organisation and ways to engage the national party members in an organic, grassroots way. For example, in the run up to the 2009 European Parliamentary elections, the PES used social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs to try and involve citizens in the various campaigns and to engage party members in constructing a common Manifesto (see Hertner, 2011). As Priestley (2010) argues, these attempts were laudable but 'the resulting programmes resembled basically disparate shopping lists, from which campaign themes could only be distilled with difficulty' (p. 5).…”

“…Given that 2009 was the first EP election where Europarties were given an explicit right to campaign and that the election was dominated by issues that require a coordinated European response such as the recession or climate change, commentators might have expected the election manifestos from the Europarties to feature prominently in the campaigns of national parties. Research by Hertner (2011) shows that finding the symbols of the Europarties on national manifestos could be hard, with only the French PS, and some of the smaller Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) parties, making explicit reference to the PES in their manifesto.…”

Candidate quality across different orders of elections: the cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia

“…The model does not involve an explicit link to independent actions of the rest of the electoral circle: the media and the political parties, 5 despite the findings of many studies showing that: (1) parties allocate fewer resources for campaigns in SOEs than in first-order contests (Maier and Tenscher 2009;Hertner 2011), which, of course, has consequences for organisation and conduct of campaigns; and (2) EP election campaigns are of low intensity and are dominated by national issues (Irwin 1995;Tenscher 2005). Moreover, EP elections are consistently found not to be very visible in national television news, and there is little doubt that media find them less interesting than national FOEs (de Vreese et al 2006;Kovář 2010).…”