European Parliament Elections of May 2014: Driven by National Politics or EU Policy Making?

Hermann Schmitt and Ilke Toygür
Additional contact information
Hermann Schmitt: Department of Politics, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK, and MZES, University of Mannheim, Germany
Ilke Toygür: Department of Political Science and International Relations, Autonomous University of Madrid, Spain, and Istanbul Policy Center, Sabanci University, Turkey

Politics and Governance, 2016, vol. 4, issue 1, 167-181

Abstract: The 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections took place in a very particular environment. Economic crisis, bailout packages, and austerity measures were central on the agenda in many Southern countries while open borders and intra-EU migration gained high salience elsewhere in the Union. A strong decline of political trust in European and national institutions was alarming. At the same time, the nomination and campaigning of “ Spitzenkandidaten ”, lead candidates of EP political groups for European Commission (EC) presidency, was meant to establish a new linkage between European Parliament elections and the (s)election of the president of the Commission. All of this might have changed the very nature of EP elections as second-order national elections. In this paper, we try to shed light on this by analysing aggregate election results, both at the country-level and at the party-level and compare them with the results of the preceding first-order national election in each EU member country. Our results suggest that the ongoing politicisation of EU politics had little impact on the second-order nature of European Parliament elections.

Keywords: economic crisis; EU policy scope; European Parliament elections; migration; second-order national elections (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/464 (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:cog:poango:v4:y:2016:i:1:p:167-181

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v4i1.464

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().