The Effect of Lead Candidates Emphasized in Election Manifestos on the Relevance of European Elections

In line with the Lisbon Treaty (2009) key institutional changes have been introduced to increase the relevance of elections to the European Parliament (EP). According to this, for the 2014 EP elections major political groups nominated different lead candidates. Using data from the 2014 Euromanifesto (EM) study, we analyze the effect of a party’s emphasis of lead candidates on the relevance for EP elections, measured mainly by turnout at the individual and the aggregate level. In a first step, we describe if parties indeed talk about lead candidates in their EP election manifestos, and study differences among party families. In a second step, we link the EM data to the European Election (EES) study and single out if the emphasis of lead candidates in a party manifesto affects turnout. Using multi-level modelling we test cross-level interactions between the salience of lead candidates and the individual recognition of candidates by voters.