Do (too many) elections depress participation? How the position, frequency and nature of domestic ballots affect turnout in European Parliament elections

François Briatte, Camille Kelbel and Julien Navarro
Additional contact information
François Briatte: European School of Political and Social Sciences, 27021Université catholique de Lille, Lille, France
Camille Kelbel: European School of Political and Social Sciences, 27021Université catholique de Lille, Lille, France
Julien Navarro: ETHICS EA 7446, 27021Université catholique de Lille, Lille, France

European Union Politics, 2024, vol. 25, issue 3, 549-568

Abstract: In Europe, the multiplication of elections makes the election calendar a decisive issue given the decreasing participatory trend. Turnout is expected to be higher in simultaneous elections, while it lessens if several elections are held over a short period. The saliency of the preceding ballot may also affect participation in the next one. In this article, we argue that these temporal effects are crucial for European Parliament elections due to their second-order nature. We analyse how the position, frequency and nature of domestic ballots affect European Parliament elections turnout since 1979. Our results indicate that the participation level is less affected by the timing of elections than by their overall frequency. The type of preceding election also matters, although not the second-order nature per se.

Keywords: European elections; European Parliament; political participation; time effects; turnout (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14651165241257779 (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:25:y:2024:i:3:p:549-568

DOI: 10.1177/14651165241257779

Access Statistics for this article

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