Learning about the unknown Spitzenkandidaten: The role of media exposure during the 2019 European Parliament elections
| Author | Simon Richter,Sebastian Stier |
| Date | 01 June 2022 |
| DOI | 10.1177/14651165211051171 |
| Published date | 01 June 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Learning about the
unknown Spitzenkandidaten:
The role of media exposure
during the 2019 European
Parliament elections
Simon Richter
Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität
Berlin, Berlin, Germany
Sebastian Stier
GESIS –Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Köln, Germany
Abstract
The Spitzenkandidaten weremeant to personalizeEuropean Parliamentelections. This paper
asks whether and through which channels the lead candidates were actually able to make
themselves known among voters –a necessary precondition for any electoral effect.
Combiningpanel surveys and onlinetracking data, the studyexplores candidatelearning dur-
ingthe German 2019 EuropeanParliament electioncampaign and relateslearning to different
types of newsexposure, with a special focus on online news. The results show that learning
was limited and unevenly distributed across candidates. However exposure to candidate-
specific online news and most types of offlinenews helped to acquire knowledge.The find-
ings imply that Spitzenkandidatenstick to voters’minds when they get exposedto them, but
that exposure is infrequent in high-choice media environments.
Keywords
Candidate learning, European Parliament elections, media effects, online news, online
tracking
Corresponding author:
Simon Richter, Otto-Suhr-Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Freie Universität Berlin, Ihnestr. 21, 14195 Berlin,
Germany.
Email: simon.richter@fu-berlin.de
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(2) 309–329
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211051171
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
European Parliament (EP) elections have traditionally suffered from low turnout
(Franklin, 2001), a fact that is commonly attributed to their ‘second-order nature’(Reif
and Schmitt, 1980). Accordingly, an impressive body of research found electoral behav-
iour in EP elections to be driven primarily by national rather than European concerns
(e.g. Hix and Marsh, 2007; Schmitt, 2005). The underlying reasons for this might be
the long discussed democratic deficit of the European Union (Follesdal and Hix, 2006)
and its complex political and institutional setting (Schmitter, 2000). To increase the
appeal of EP elections, the establishment of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten system in
2014 was meant to personalize the vote by linking EP election results to the nomination
of the European Commission (EC) presidency such that the nominee should come from
the party family with the biggest vote share. This aimed to enhance the value of citizens’
voting rights, render European politics more tangible and, eventually, mobilize more
voters (Hobolt, 2014).
The party families were therefore asked to nominate the so-called Spitzenkandidaten
who run for the presidency and promote their policy platforms in pan-European cam-
paigns. In this sense, the Spitzenkandidaten should be the public ambassadors of the
electoral process, fostering the feeling of electoral accountability among European
voters (Christiansen, 2016). Their presence, campaign communication and the media
coverage thereof (Gattermann, 2020) was supposed to add a layer of personalization to
voting behaviour. Yet, studies about the electoral effects of the Spitzenkandidaten uncov-
ered rather mixed results for the first two elections (Gattermann and De Vreese, 2022;
Gattermann and Marquart, 2020; Schmitt et al., 2015). So far it is unclear whether the
pan-European candidates were able to mobilize (more) voters or change the considera-
tions underlying voting behaviour.
Against this backdrop, we follow Gattermann and de Vreese (2020) and take one step
back by asking: Are the European Spitzenkandidaten actually getting through to voters in
the first place? Do voters learn about the European Spitzenkandidaten? And can this
learning be related to specific information exposure? When answering the latter question
we pay special attention to the role of online news media that are increasingly important
news sources (Newman et al., 2019). At the same time, researchers have raised concerns
about the differences between the online information environment and traditional media
channels (Aelst et al., 2017), namely its overly selective nature, which may hinder actual
political learning (Bennett and Iyengar, 2008).
Drawing on an integrated data setincluding panel surveys, self-reported media exposure
measures, a passive tracking of web browsing behaviour and a web crawling of the actual
online contentseen, we find that German voters indeed learnedabout the Spitzenk andidaten
during the 2019 EP election campaign. Learning processes could be linked to various
offline media channels and online media exposure –when restricting the measures to top-
ically relevant news articles. In contrast to previous observational studies linking self-
reports of media exposure and content analysison the source level (e.g. all election-related
articles of a given newspaper), our researchdesign captures online content exposureon the
article level . These fine-grained measurements provide evidence for a widespread
310 European Union Politics 23(2)
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