The role of candidate evaluations in the 2014 European Parliament elections: Towards the personalization of voting behaviour?

Katjana Gattermann and Claes H De Vreese

European Union Politics, 2017, vol. 18, issue 3, 447-468

Abstract: We study the personalization of voting behaviour in European Parliament elections. We argue that information from the media is crucial for providing linkages between candidates and voters. Moreover, we contend that candidates can serve as information short-cuts given the complexity of European Union politics. We use a four-wave Dutch panel survey and a media study that enable us to link evaluations of lead candidates, party preferences, and vote choice to exposure to news about these candidates. We show, firstly, that exposure to candidate news is a strong explanatory factor for candidate recognition. Secondly, we find that candidate evaluations positively affect party choice, albeit mainly for those voters who tend to be politically aware. Our research has implications for debates about the European Union’s accountability deficit.

Keywords: Content analysis; European Parliament elections; media effects; personalization of politics; voter survey (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116517704519 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:eeupol:v:18:y:2017:i:3:p:447-468

DOI: 10.1177/1465116517704519

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in European Union Politics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().