The European Parliament Elections in May 2014 followed a time of economic and financial crisis that has put the democratic quality of European governance to the fore, and affected the European institutions, the policy choices at the national and regional level, and the relations between different levels. The election outcome would support theories of second order elections, with large government parties losing vote shares, whereas small and populist parties gained.

Yet the relations between levels are also a matter of timing and of electoral cycles. In some countries the European elections coincided with, or were held very close to, national (and/or lower level) elections. For example, in Belgium, the European elections were held on the same day as the federal and the regional elections. In Sweden, general, regional and local elections were organized in September. Simultaneous, or close, elections give us the opportunity to investigate variation in voting behaviour across different groups of people (e.g. split-ticket voting, protest voting, same party across all levels etc). This allows us to expand our knowledge beyond the so called second order national election model (Reif & Schmitt 1980) and explore the micro-foundations of individuals’ vote choice. Papers presented in this panel will investigate the dynamics of multilevel voting and multilevel electoral competition during the 2014 European (and other) elections both from the perspective of the voters (voting behaviour and electoral results) and from the perspective of the parties (party strategies and party-voter congruence).