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

Abstract

The second-order paradigm is the dominant framework for research on electoral behavior in European Parliament (EP) elections. In this study, we assess to what degree voting patterns in the 2014 EP election were characterized by secondorderness. While most studies of second-order voting behavior rely on macro-level accounts or suffer from potentially conflated vote measures, this study relies on panel data from the 2013 national and the 2014 EP election in Austria. We study change patterns in electoral behavior and, more importantly, assess the motives behind differences in vote choices between first-and second-order elections. Overall, the findings point towards a persisting relevance of the second-order framework for explaining voting in the 2014 EP election.

Europe matters … upon closer investigation: a novel approach for analysing individual-level determinants of vote choice across first- and second-order elections, applied to 2019 Italy

“…While this is true in general, it however does not imply that the theory does not produce any argument about voters' electoral behaviour at the individual level, and indeed several scholars have empirically tested individual-level implications of the second-order model (see e.g. Boomgaarden et al ., 2016; Schmitt et al ., 2020). 2 Let us see several.…”

The Political Attitudes of Divided European Citizens

“…Research to date has impressively documented this fact; because people are much more interested in national politics, they identify more strongly with the nation state, and they also participate much more regularly in national elections. The European Union places second politically in many respects (Reiff and Schmitt 1980;Hix and Marsh 2007;Hobolt and Wittrock 2011;Boomgaarden et al 2016). Moreover, people assess the EU and their country's membership from the perspective of their immediate reality and national affiliation, using national polities and politics as a proxy, a yardstick or a benchmark to assess the EU, as this relational element has previously been termed (Anderson 1998;Kritzinger 2003;Muñoz et al 2011;Desmet et al 2012; Armingeon and Ceka 2014; de Vries 2018).…”

“…There is some evidence of European influences on national politics. Citizens might have national agendas in mind when participating in European elections (Reiff and Schmitt 1980;Heath, McLean, Taylor and Curtice 1999;Boomgaarden et al 2016), but European agendas and representational questions influence electoral choices in their own right, too (Clark and Rohrschneider 2009;Hobolt and Wittrock 2011). Additionally, the institutional and political context of the EU has had an impact on voter turnout and party choice within member states (van der Eijk, Franklin and Marsh 1996), and European politics seem to shape citizens' voting decisions in national election campaigns, for instance by providing smaller, populist and Eurosceptic parties with contentious issues aimed at mobilising voters and coordinating electoral campaigning cross-nationally (Krouwel and Abts 2007;Kriesi and Pappas 2015;Hong 2015;Kneuer 2019).…”

Priming Europe: Media effects on loyalty, voice and exit in European Parliament elections

“…Regarding electoral competition, voice is the most harmful option for ruling parties while the harmfulness of exit depends more on the overall mobilization levels. Differentiating between both forms of disloyalty does not only help us to determine the harmfulness, it also speaks to more refined perspectives on second-order elections located on the microlevel which link turnout and party choice to determine and explain vote share differences (e.g., Rohrschneider and Clark, 2008;Weber, 2011;Giebler, 2014;Giebler and Wagner, 2015;Boomgaarden et al, 2016).…”