Disengaging elections? Political interest, number of elections, and turnout in elections to the European Parliament
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116521998455 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Disengaging elections?
Political interest, number
of elections, and turnout
in elections to the
European Parliament
Jeffrey Nonnemacher
Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Abstract
Since direct elections to the European Parliament began in 1979, variations in voting
behavior in European Parliament elections from national elections have raised interest-
ing questions about political behavior. I add to a growing literature that explores turn-
out in European Parliament elections by focusing on the count of national elections
between European Parliament elections. Through a cross-national study of elections, I
find that turnout decreases in the European Parliament contest following cycles with
numerous national contests. Then, using data from the European Election Study, I argue
that this is the result of frequent elections decreasing turnout particularly among
already low interest voters who stay home. My findings have implications for how
formal rules of multi-level elections shape political behavior more generally and
voter fatigue in particular.
Keywords
Elections, European Parliament elections, European politics, political disengagement,
turnout
Corresponding author:
Jeffrey Nonnemacher,Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, 4600 Wesley W.Posvar Hall,
Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA.
Email: jnonnemacher@pitt.edu
European Union Politics
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DOI: 10.1177/1465116521998455
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2021, Vol. 22(3) 545–565
Introduction
Since direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) began in 1979, turnout in
these contests has dropped from around 60% in 1979 to around 42% in 2014.
In the 2019 contests, turnout increased for the first time in the history of EP
elections after eight contests which saw declines in turnout. Furthermore, the turn-
out levels vary across member states from consistently high turnout around 80%
to 90% (Belgium and Luxembourg) to consistently low turnout around 20% to
30% (United Kingdom (UK), Slovakia). The wide variance across the member
states coupled with a consistent decline in overall turnout raises important ques-
tions about the relationship between voters and EP elections. Given the increasing
challenges facing Europe and role the EU plays in addressing those challenges,
why do voters abstain in EP elections?
In this article, I contribute to a large and growing literature that attempts to
answer this question by focusing on the effect of the scheduling of national elec-
tions on voter turnout in EP elections. Since the financial crisis, several countries
have held frequent elections in short succession. For example, Spain has held four
general elections since 2015 including two in 2019 after stalled coalition talks, a
corruption scandal involving the Prime Minister, and attempts to increase the
governing party’s majority. In the UK, following the Brexit referendum in 2016,
there were general elections in 2017 and again in 2019 due to the controversy over
Brexit. The goal of this article is to better understand the relationship between
frequent elections in countries like Spain or the UK and political participation.
The timing of elections is frequently included in studies of turnout in EP elec-
tions as part of the second-order model of EP elections, which views EP elections
as extensions of national politics (Reif and Schmidt, 1980). However, these studies
have focused on the effect of the most proximate national election to the European
election (Garmann, 2016, 2017; Schakel and Dandoy, 2014). In particular,
Garmann (2017) demonstrates that the raw number of elections depresses turnout,
but his analysis focuses solely on Germany and he restricts his analysis to two years
prior to the EP contest. Building on this work in the European turnout literature,
I argue that the entire electoral cycle matters, and that the entire number of nation-
al elections between European elections is associated with lower turnout, especially
among those who have low levels of political interest.
To conduct this study, I combine cross-national panel data on the number of
elections between EP elections by counting parliamentary elections, presidential
elections, and referendum. I include a series of controls for institutional factors
that influence voter behavior as well as the number of days a national election is
held before and after an EP election. In a second step, I then explore the relation-
ship between interest and the number of elections using survey data from the 2019
wave of the European Election Study (EES, Schmitt et al., 2019). I find a signif-
icant effect of political interest as a moderator of the negative effect of the number
of elections on the likelihood of turning out and provide the first individual-level
study of the effects of frequent elections on European turnout.
546 European Union Politics 22(3)
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