Saturday, April 16, 2016
Maestro B (DoubleTree by Hilton Philadelphia Center City)
Although the competencies of the European Union (EU) have increased considerably over the past decades, the second-order character of elections to the European Parliament (EP) is uncontested. Compared to national elections, they are (still) described as less important. To test the second order character of EP elections scholars focused mainly on voting behavior, the demand side of political competition. In contrast, the supply side received astonishingly little attention so far. The aim of this paper is to help filling this gap by examining whether political parties act strategically in line with the second-order approach when emphasizing EU issues in their party manifestos; i.e. e.g. smaller or ideologically extreme parties tend to put more emphasis on European issues in Euromanifestos than in national election manifestos. In doing so, we focus on the salience of European issues in party manifestos issued at the occasion of the two electoral arenas, in 15 European countries over seven elections, from 1979 to 2009. We use data from the MARPOR and the EUROMANIFESTO Project. Empirically, we first compare the overall share of mentions of European issues in an EP election and the closest previous first-order national election. Secondly, using time series cross-section modelling we study the determinants of differential EU issue emphasis inferred from the second-order election approach. Our findings show that extreme parties act strategically and in line with the second-order model. In their Euromanifestos they tend to put more emphasis on European issues than in their manifestos issued ahead of national elections.
