When do parties put Europe in the centre? Evidence from the 2019 European Parliament election campaign
| Author | Alessandro Nai,Jürgen Maier,Sebastian Stier,Carlos Jalali,Michaela Maier |
| Published date | 01 November 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/02633957211008348 |
| Date | 01 November 2021 |
| Subject Matter | Special Issue Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/02633957211008348
Politics
2021, Vol. 41(4) 433 –450
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/02633957211008348
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
When do parties put Europe
in the centre? Evidence from
the 2019 European Parliament
election campaign
Michaela Maier*
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Carlos Jalali*
University of Aveiro, Portugal
Jürgen Maier*
University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany
Alessandro Nai
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands
Sebastian Stier
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Germany
Abstract
European elections have been described as second-order phenomena for voters, the media, but
also parties. Yet, since 2009, there exists evidence that not only voters, but also political parties
assign increasing significance to European elections. While initially ‘issue entrepreneurs’ were
held responsible for this development, the latest campaigns have raised the question of whether
mainstream parties are finally also campaigning on European issues. In this article, we examine
European Union (EU) salience in the 2019 European Parliament (EP) campaigns of government
and opposition parties and the predictors of their strategic behaviours. We test the relevance of
factors derived from the selective emphasis and the co-orientation approach within an integrated
model of strategic campaign communication based on expert evaluations of 191 parties in 28 EU
member states. Results show that the traditional expectation that government parties silence EU
issues does not hold anymore; instead, the average EU salience of government and opposition
parties is similar on the national level. The strongest predictors for a party’s decision to campaign
*Equal contributions.
Corresponding author:
Michaela Maier, Department of Communication Psychology, University of Koblenz-Landau, Fortstr. 7, 76829
Landau, Germany.
Email: mmaier@uni-landau.de
1008348POL0010.1177/02633957211008348PoliticsMaier et al.
research-article2021
Special Issue Article
434 Politics 41(4)
on EU issues are the co-orientation towards the campaign agendas of competing parties, and
party’s EU position.
Keywords
co-orientation, European election campaigns, expert survey, integrated model, party
communication
Received: 29th May 2020; Revised version received: 7th January 2021; Accepted: 16th March 2021
Introduction
Competition lies at the heart of democratic elections. Normative conceptions tend to posit
democratic electoral competition as being centred on rival substantive policy platforms,
on which parties and/or candidates campaign, and from which voters choose depending
on their positions on different issues. We can thus speak of a democratic political market,
where parties supply the policies from which citizens choose (Schmidt, 1996). Yet this
market is also potentially liable to inefficiencies. Parties can choose to underplay, or even
silence, certain issues from their campaigns.
In this article, we assess the factors that account for a greater silencing or incorporation
of issues in campaigns. We do so by examining the specific case of European Union (EU)
issues in the 2019 European Parliament (EP) elections, seeking to answer the following
overall research question: What factors led parties to emphasise (or downplay) EU issues
from their EP election campaigns?
EP elections provide a particularly interesting setting in which to explore what drives
the greater or lesser inclusion of issues in political campaigns for two interrelated reasons.
The first is an empirical one. EP elections have long been described as the archetypal
‘second-order national election’, with campaigns dominated by national rather than
European issues. However, studies on more recent EP elections suggest, at the very least,
a waning of this ‘second-order’ nature. This begs the question of whether this trend con-
tinued in the 2019 EP election; and, to the extent that it did, what drove it and what
explains variations. The second is a normative one. As the only direct election for EU
institutions, EP elections provide a singular context for citizens and parties to engage in
EU matters. As such, its campaigns should relate to European issues, so that the resulting
parliament can provide an identifiable and robust link ‘connecting European policies to
the electorate in a chain of political accountability’ (Scharpf, 2006: 18). If campaigns
downplay EU issues, then the quality of EU democracy is weakened.
Overall, then, this article seeks to explain what led parties to put Europe more on the
agenda in their EP election campaigns. We do so by assessing the campaign strategies of
191 parties across all 28 EU member states based on the 2019 European Parliament
Election Expert Survey (EPEES_19) dataset. We analyse which factors drove parties to
bring up EU issues in their 2019 EP election campaigns, and which factors hindered
them from doing so, using an integrated model of strategic campaign communication,
building on the selective emphasis and the co-orientation approaches. This article thus
contributes to existing knowledge by theoretically integrating and then simultaneously
testing predictors from both approaches, that have emerged as important in earlier stud-
ies, and doing so for all 28 EU member states, enabling a more reliable assessment of
their relevance and impact.
To continue reading
Request your trial