Issues that mobilize Europe. The role of key policy issues for voter turnout in the 2019 European Parliament election
| Author | Constantin Schäfer,Daniela Braun |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/14651165211040337 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Issues that mobilize
Europe. The role of key
policy issues for voter
turnout in the 2019
European Parliament
election
Daniela Braun
Geschwister-Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich,
Munich, Germany
Constantin Schäfer
Institute of Political Science, University of Münster, Münster,
Germany
Abstract
In light of the unexpectedly high turnout in the 2019 European Parliament election, we
explore how major transnational policy issues mobilize voters in European electoral
contests. Based on the analysis of two data sets, the Eurobarometer post-election survey
and the RECONNECT panel survey, we make three important observations. First,
European citizens show a higher tendency to participate in European Parliament elec-
tions when they attribute greater importance to the issues ‘climate change and environ-
ment’,‘economy and growth’, and ‘immigration’. Second, having a more extreme opinion
on the issue of ‘European integration’increases people’s likelihood to vote in European
elections. Third, the mobilizing effect of personal issue importance is enhanced by the
systemic salience that the respective policy issue has during the election campaign.
These findings show the relevance of issue mobilization in European Parliament elec-
tions as well as its context-dependent nature.
Keywords
European Parliament elections, European Union, political issues, mobilization, turnout
Corresponding author:
Daniela Braun, Geschwister-Scholl Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538
Munich, Germany.
Email: daniela.braun@gsi.uni-muenchen.de
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(1) 120–140
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/14651165211040337
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Introduction
After a decade during which the European Union (EU) has been riddled by a multi-
faceted crisis and increased politicization, the 2019 election to the European
Parliament (EP) was accompanied by the dictum that the future of Europe is at stake
(Braun, 2021; Treib, 2021). While similar debates in the past, such as around the intro-
duction of the Spitzenkandidaten system in 2014, had only limited effects on voter mobi-
lization (Braun and Schwarzbözl, 2019; Gattermann et al., 2016), fears about the future of
Europe seem to have incited a strong rise in EU-wide electoral participation in 2019.
Voter turnout increased from 42.6% (in 2014) to 50.7% –the highest turnout in the
past 20 years and the first time that overall participation in EP elections did not decrease
but increased. Although electoral contests at the European level can still be considered
‘second-order elections’(Boomgaarden et al., 2016; Plescia et al., 2020a; Reif and
Schmitt, 1980; Schäfer, 2021; Schmitt et al., 2020), the 2019 election might have
been different. The presumption that more Europeans went to the ballot box to
shape the future path of the EU is reinfo rced by some immediate analyses of th e 2019
EP election that ascribe the increase in electoral participation, at least partly, to a
greater ‘Europeanness’(Braun, 2021) and a higher politicization of EP elections
(De Sio et al., 2019: 64).
The suggestion that a more intense debate over European issues in the run-up to the
elections positively impacted individual participation in the 2019 EP election, is rein-
forced by a simple observation: despite the rise in turnout across Europe, there is still
a considerable variance in the absolute participation levels between the EU member
states (see Figure 1(a)). Importantly, such differences are also visible when we take a
look at the most important mobilizing issues during the 2019 EP election (see
Figure 1(b)). When being asked about the issues that ‘made you vote in the recent
European Parliament elections’, the majority of people in many countries reported that
the economy was key for their participation. However, in other countries the strongest
mobilizing issues were climate change, immigration, or European integration. Observing
such a variance might seem surprising, but it indicates the persisting second-order nature
of EP election campaigns, where issues are discussed by national actors in national
public spaces (Boomgaarden and De Vreese, 2016). The intriguing question is how rele-
vant these issues were for voter turnout in the 2019 EP election and which issues
exerted the strongest mobilization power. To answer these questions, we need to shift
the focus from the macro-level to the citizen-level and delve into the micro-foundations
of the relationship between policy issues and electoral behavior.
This article explores whether and through which mechanisms policy issues affect
electoral participation. In particular, we investigate the impact of the four major transna-
tional policy issues ‘economy’,‘immigration’,‘environment/climate change’and
‘European integration’on individual electoral participation. We argue, first, that EU citi-
zens showed a higher tendency to participate in the 2019 European election when they
attributed a greater relevance to one or more of these issues, meaning that they found
an issue to be salient or held a rather extreme opinion on a policy issue. Second, we
argue that people were more likely to vote when the policy issues they subjectively
Braun and Schäfer 121
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