No abstract

Elections to the European Parliament fall within the category of second-order elections (SOEs). Because these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government, there is less at stake and, consequently, voters behave differently when casting votes. But do also political parties also behave as if there is less at stake as voters do? This article draws on an original dataset on the political experience of party candidates in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to explicitly link the SOE model to independent actions of political parties. The results show that political parties indeed nominate higher quality candidates to the first-order arena, where more is at stake. Moreover, parties in government in first-order arena react to domestic situation and nominate lower quality candidates to EP elections than parties in opposition. IntroductionThe fact that elections to the European Parliament (EP) are different from national parliamentary elections in European Union (EU) member states has been evident ever since the very first of these Europe-wide elections were held in 1979. In their immediate aftermath, Reif and Schmitt (1980) labelled first direct EP elections as "second-order national elections" (for an overview, see Marsh and Mikhaylov 2010). In a later work, Reif (1997) proposed an operational definition of such second-order elections (SOEs):

European Parliament (EP) elections fall within the category of second-order elections: because these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government there is less at stake and, consequently, voters behave differently when casting ballot. However, since the behaviour of voters in elections cannot be perceived in isolation from the behaviours of political parties and media, the question then arises if media (and political parties) also perceive that there is less at stake and hence they behave differently. To this aim, this article analyses the news media coverage of the 2004 and 2009 EP elections in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (N = 5672) and, at the same time, integrates the second-order election theory with the behaviours of the media. Moreover, the article provides unique comparative evidence of news coverage of national parliamentary (N = 5435) and EP elections in both countries. The results indicate that media across the EU only marginally cover EP elections and particularly less than national first-order elections and that coverage of EP elections is dominated by domestic EU political actors. The findings are discussed in the light of existing literature on EP elections, the existence of Europeanised public spheres and EU’s legitimacy as well as democratic deficit.