Referendum outcomes and trust in government: Public support for Europe in the wake of Maastricht

When Europe matters: The impact of political information on voting behaviour in EU referendums

“…In "second-order elections", national issues tend to dominate the campaigns and voters are thus expected to use their vote as a means of signalling their satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the government or to follow the recommendations of national parties (Franklin, Marsh & McLaren, 1994;Franklin, Marsh & Wlezien, 1994;Franklin et al 1995). In a recent study, Franklin (2002) has provided a synthesis of these two approaches, indicating that conditioning factors such as the salience of European matters may influence the extent to which second-order election factors are relevant.…”

Public perceptions of the EU as a system of governance

“…The second dimension, as we have seen some evidence of above, is the contest between the sovereignty of the nation-state in the face of the continuing integration or supra-nationalism (Hooghe and Marks 1999). While some have linked EU support with satisfaction with incumbent government (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1995), more recent contributions have demonstrated further that support for incumbent parties is linked to pro-EU stances while support for opposition parties is anti-EU. Yet, while Ray (2003a) concedes this point, he argues that this takes place under the contingency of the timing of national and EU elections (and EU policy referenda) such that, ".…”

“…19 While satisfaction with the EU performance has been understood as a function of satisfaction with incumbent government (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1995;Ray 2003a) and positive evaluations of national government (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1995), the argument has resulted in a discussion over the use of national governments as proxies for explicit supra-national performance-based assessments (Anderson 1998;Franklin, Marsh, and Wlezien 1994b). Support for national governments and their parties has been understood as a heuristic through which citizens could make proxy assessments of the performance of the EU.…”

“…In older member states in which national institutions work well, domestic elites can affect how mass publics evaluate the EU (Franklin, van der Eijk, and Marsh 1995;Weßels 1995); yet, others have argued that following the Maastricht Treaty, 20 this may be less true as national party elites have been argued not only to ignore EU policy implication in national political debates but even actively generate public resistance to integration (Anderson 1998;Franklin, Marsh, and McLaren 1994a). Further, sub-national elites have been shown to view their nations' EU membership as largely irrelevant to their platform (Hughes, Sasse, and Gordan 2002).…”

Voting at National versus European Elections: An Individual Level Test of the Second Order Paradigm for the 2014 European Parliament Elections

“…A second motivation (that would lead to a similar outcome as the sincere voting assumption discussed above) is that voters use the EP election to demonstrate discontent with national politics, in particular the national government (Franklin, van der Eijk, & Marsh, 1995;. Since there is apparently little at stake in EP elections, voters may use these elections as a kind of referendum to send signals of dissatisfaction to the national government.…”