Do Spitzenkandidaten really make a difference? An experiment on the effectiveness of personalized European Parliament election campaigns

Katjana Gattermann and Franziska Marquart

European Union Politics, 2020, vol. 21, issue 4, 612-633

Abstract: This article investigates the impact of pan-European candidates in European Parliament election campaigns. It focusses on the two 2019 nominees for the European Greens , who were Dutch and German, respectively. We conducted a pre-registered experiment in the Netherlands and Germany in early April 2019 to test the effects of (non-)personalized campaign posters on (a) turnout intention and (b) vote intention for the Greens alongside possible mediating effects of campaign and candidate evaluations. Our results suggest that while personalized campaigns as opposed to non-personalized campaigns may not matter per se for turnout and vote intention, individual candidates can make a difference in European elections, particularly with respect to vote intention. As such, the results have important implications for our understanding of European Parliament election campaigns.

Keywords: Elections; European Union; experiment; personalization of politics; voting behaviour (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1465116520938148 (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:21:y:2020:i:4:p:612-633

DOI: 10.1177/1465116520938148

Access Statistics for this article

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