Introduction to the special issue: No longer second-order? Explaining the European Parliament elections of 2019

Abstract

The dominant perspective of European Parliament (EP) elections is that these are second-order national elections where little is at stake. This Special Issue asks whether this perspective is still valid in view of increased politicization of European integration and in view of the higher turnout levels at the last EP elections. This introduction provides a general framework for the Special Issue and reflects upon some of its main findings. We argue that EP elections can only be considered first-order if they are primarily about the policies, rather than the polity. Some of the contributions in this Special Issue suggest that this is indeed the case. We reflect upon this and argue that there are reasons to expect that EP elections will become more first order in the future.

Awakening the Europhile Giant: EU Issue Voting in Western and Central‐Eastern Europe

“…The relative generalisability of this finding across Europe may have important implications for the theory of EU politicisation, as it demonstrates that voters have increasingly matched party positions on European integration, with the EU conflict becoming more important in European party systems. As was expected, the 2019 EP elections experienced a more intense pattern of EU issue voting becoming, as a result, apparently less second order than in preceding elections (Gattermann et al 2021). Of course, to definitively challenge the second-order paradigm, it would be necessary to keep monitoring the process of EU issue voting in future elections.…”

“…Thus, the deepening authority transfer did not produce any abrupt voter reactions but, instead, provided parties with more incentives to prime EU issues, which were to become later heightened by the outbreak of the multiple set of crises, affecting the electoral preferences of parties. Furthermore, the 2019 EP elections appeared to be less second order compared to the previous ones (Gattermann et al 2021). Scholars have usually regarded EP elections as second-order elections, where voting choices are primarily based on domestic considerations, mirroring lower levels of electoral turnout (Reif and Schmitt 1980).…”

Party contestation and news visibility abroad: The 2019 European Parliament election from a pan-European perspective

“…As for Euroscepticism, left-right positions are taken from the CHES survey. Moreover, media attention might be higher for parties that significantly increased or lost electoral support compared to the last election (see Gattermann et al, 2021b), which additionally taps the news value of ‘surprise’. We therefore account for the absolute change in the party's vote share since the 2014 European election.…”

“…What do these developments mean for news reporting of political parties in other European countries in the aftermath of EP elections? EP elections are still considered second order, despite a few indications that EU policies have played a more important role in the 2019 EP election compared to before (Gattermann et al, 2021a). In other words, questions related to the polity still dominate the campaigns and electoral behaviour.…”

Using web archives for an explorative study of the web presence of German parties during the European election 2019

“…Particular importance is payed to the question, whether the campaigns are "dominated by domestic issues [or] issues on the EU agenda" (Hix and Marsh 2011: 4). By answering this question, we would like to contribute to the broader debate about, whether the second order election model still possesses explanatory power (Schmitt and Toygür 2016: 176;Ehin and Talving 2021) or whether "the traditional distinction between first-and second-order election is insufficient to grasp the public sphere dynamics of politicised EP elections" (Galpin and Trenz 2019: 1, see also Galpin and Trenz 2019;Gattermann, de Vreese and van der Brug 2021). By analysing internet-based data, we want to connect the discussion on the opportunities of the so-called digital revolution in social science and the "avalanche of data related to politics" (Wilkerson and Casas 2017: 530) that the world wide web offers (Kaiser 2014;Alvares 2016;Wilkerson and Casas 2017).…”