The Impact of Economic Perceptions on Voting Behaviour in European Parliamentary Elections

Abstract

Economic voting is a key explanatory factor for the short-term variation of vote choice, party competition and electoral volatility. This article applies the well-established literature on economic voting to the analysis of European Parliament elections. In theoretical terms, it focuses on a forward-looking selection model and probes the difficulties of signal extraction in the multilevel context of European Union politics. In methodological terms, hierarchical mixed logit models are used so as to explore the magnitude and the determinants of economic voting in the 2004 and the subsequent 2009 EP elections. Although the EU has acquired significant economic policy domains from the Member States, and therewith effectively blurring political responsibility for economic policies, this analysis demonstrates that voters are nevertheless able to extract competence signals and cast an economic vote.

The Effect that Structural and Investment Funds have on Voter Behaviour in European Parliamentary Elections

“…Previous work on EP elections and economic perceptions has found mixed results (see Bartkowska and Tiemann, ; Okolikj and Quinlan, ; Page, ; Tilley et al ., ). In our analysis, however, we shift attention to SIFs as the EP economic voting determinant.…”

The Impact of the Economic Crisis on Euroscepticism

“…An initial group of studies addressing this issue through the lens of strategic non-voting (Schmitt and Mannheimer, 1991;Franklin et al, 1996;Blondel et al, 1998) resulted in inconclusive findings whereby in comparison to national elections, economic voting at the EP level involves additional complexity since the economic policy domains of EU institutions are frequently vaguely defined, such that there are relatively few studies (Tilley et al, 2008). However, Schmitt and van der Eijk (2008: 214) suggest that with the greater transfer of policy to the EU and successive enlargements, then "Eurosceptic abstentions in EP elections might have become more numerous and hence, strategic non-voting in the EU more important than in the past" while such considerations feature prominently among the hypothesised empirical determinants of vote choice in both the 2004 and the 2009 EP elections (Bartkowska and Tiemann, 2014).…”

Can Information Increase Turnout in European Parliament Elections? Evidence from a Quasi‐experiment in Denmark

“…When explaining turnout in European Parliament elections, the extant literature has primarily focused on country‐level factors, such as the usual level of turnout in the country, presence of compulsory voting, the level of subsidies the country receives from the EU or the timing of the elections (Franklin, ; Mattila, ; for an important exception, see Bartkowska and Tiemann, ). In the same vein, a recent study found that the changing generational composition is an important factor in explaining turnout in European elections (Bhatti and Hansen, ).…”