The composition of the directly elected European Parliament does not precisely reflect the "real" balance of political forces in the European Community. As long as the national political systems decide most of what there is t o be decided politically, and everything really important, European elections are additional national second-order elections. They are determined more by the domestic political cleavages than by alternatives originating in the EC, but in a different way than if nine first-order national elections took place simultaneously. This is the case because European elections occur at different stages of the national political systems' respective "electoral cycles". Such a relationship between a second-order arena and the chief arena of a political system is not at all unusual. What is new here, is that one second-order political arena is related to nine different first-order arenas. A first analysis of European election results satisfactorily justifies the assumption that European Parliament direct elections should be treated as nine simultaneous national second-order elections.

The 2014 European Parliament elections were the first elections where the major political groups each nominated a lead candidate ( Spitzenkandidat) for the Commission presidency in the hope that this would increase the visibility of the elections and mobilize more citizens to turn out. Using data from the 2014 European Elections Study, an EU-wide post-election survey, we analyse whether and how the presence of the lead candidates influenced the individual probability to participate in these elections. Our findings show that the recognition of the candidates increased the propensity to turn out, even when controlling for a host of other individual-level factors explaining turnout and the context factors known to facilitate participation. Furthermore, the campaign efforts of the lead candidates are associated with higher turnout levels and are reinforced by candidate recognition.

A quarter of a century ago the first series of European Parliament elections were characterised as second-order national elections. Much has changed since, which might have had an impact upon this diagnosis. In this article the central assumptions and predictions of the second-order elections model are restated and evaluated against the outcome of the 2004 European Parliament election and a postelection survey. Surprisingly enough, the findings confirm the persisting second-order nature of EP elections for Western Europe. Matters look very different, however, in the eight new Central and East European member countries. European Parliament Elections Are Second-Order National ElectionsWhen democracies rest on a stable, consolidated party system, elections are all but independent events. This fact holds for consecutive elections in the same political arena, where the result of the last contest is usually a more or less close approximation of the outcome of the next. It also holds for elections at different levels of a political system where an election result at the main level tends to affect the outcome of elections at other levels. This pattern is nothing new or extraordinary, as numerous publications demonstrate: the result of US mid-term elections relate in a characteristic way to those of the preceding presidential election (Campbell 1966; Stimpson 1976;Campbell 1993). The same goes for German Landtagswahlen, which are not unitary mid-term events but scattered all over the federal legislative period. In the early years, their results used to follow the national electoral cycle rather closely (Dinkel 1977) while this connection, perhaps as a result of the complex and complicated process of German re-unification, seems to have weakened in the last decade or so (Schmitt and Reif 2003). To be sure, it does not take a federal system to establish a link between the results of elections at different levels. Byelections in Britain (Norris 1990), or sub-national elections in France ) all seem to follow the same logic.In an early article which today reads as an explorer in the then uncharted territories of 'multi-level governance', 1 Karlheinz Reif and I distinguished two interrelated classes, or types, of elections. One of them is generally perceived to be important, sometimes even very important (as when the pre-electoral support of government and opposition is or seems to be almost equally strong, or when stark contrasts about major policy decisions characterise the appeals of the contenders, or both); these are first-order elections. First-order elections decide who is in power and what policies are pursued. Every electoral system disposes of a first-order election. But everywhere there are other elections in addition. This other and broader class we have called second-order elections. They are perceived to be less important, because there is less at stake. Examples are not only the sub-national or partial elections, but also the supranational election of the members of the European Parliament. For all member countr...

Depressed mood is an independent risk factor for all-cause mortality in medical inpatients. Identifying patients at risk does not require formal psychiatric diagnoses, but can be achieved by means of a short, routinely administered self-rating questionnaire.