Issue characterization of electoral change (and how recent elections in Western Europe were won on economic issues) (original) (raw)

Explaining Europe’s transformed electoral landscape: structure, salience, and agendas

European Political Science Review

What has caused the marked, cross-national, and unprecedented trends in European electoral results in the 21st century? Scholarly explanations include social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We argue that these electoral changes more proximally result from public issue salience, which results from societal trends and mainly affects rather than is caused by party agenda setting. We use aggregate-level panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues—unemployment, immigration, and the environment—is associated with later variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in theoretically expected directions, while the party system issue agenda has weaker associations. Public issue salience, in turn, is rooted in societal trends (unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies), and, in some cases, party agenda setting. We validate our...

Real-World Trends, Public Issue Salience, and Electoral Results in Europe

Social Science Research Network, 2022

Europe has experienced several marked, cross-national trends in electoral results in the 21st century, which scholars have explained using social structure and challenger party entrepreneurship. We propose a third theoretical explanation: (1) electoral outcomes have resulted from marked changes in what issues Europeans perceive as the most important affecting their countries; and (2) the latter have been determined by "real-world" societal developments, in addition to a changing party system issue agenda. We use panel data across 28 European countries to show that the public issue salience of three issues-unemployment, immigration, and the environment-explains variation in the results of the conservative, social democrat, liberal, radical right, radical left, and green party families in line with theoretical expectations, while the party system issue agenda has weaker effects. We also show that the public salience of these issues is rooted in unemployment rates, immigration rates and temperature anomalies, and party agenda-setting; and that the party system issue agenda follows public issue salience but not our societal trends. We validate our mechanism at the individual-level across 28 European countries and again using panel data. Our findings have implications for our understanding of the agency of parties, the permanency of recent electoral changes, and how voters reconcile their social and political worlds.

Parties, Candidates and Voters in the 2009 Election to the European Parliament

2012

This paper pursues three broad research questions. On the most general level, we are interested in the effectiveness of political parties in EU electoral politics. There are two aspects of this very general question that are empirically somewhat more accessible. The first concerns the ability of political parties to effectively communicate their issue positions and policy concerns to the citizenry. Do citizens perceive the electoral messages of political parties in such a way that they can decode them in terms of generalised policy positions, or ideologies?

What voters teach us about Europe-Wide elections: What Europe-Wide elections teach us about voters

Electoral Studies, 1996

With four sets of European parliamentary elections now behind us, it is appropriate to review the prevailing interpretation of such elections as second-order national elections, a view first put forward by Reif and Schmitt in 1980. While the second-order model has yielded important insights into the way European elections can be understood as manifesting national political processes, more recent research has fruitfully turned the model on its head, and focused on what European elections can tell us about national elections and the nature of the voting act. Indeed, the use of individual-level survey data to study elections to the European Parliament has for the first time truly shown us the importance of institutional and political context in conditioning turnout and party choice. Findings of recent research suggest that the second-order features of European elections should be thought of as contextual variables that can affect other elections as well.

The Electoral Trade-Off: How Issues and Ideology Affect Party Preference Formation in Europe

Political science has shown increasing interest in cross-country differences in the extent of structural voting, ideological voting and issue voting. Several studies have identified how voting behaviour is structured in post-communist democracies of East Central Europe and established democracies of Western Europe. This paper looks beyond a simple East-West distinction by developing a more sophisticated general model to explain cross-country variations in the effects of issues and left/right on party support. We demonstrate that the more issues are related to left/right, the stronger is the effect of left/right on party preferences. This effect occurs at the expense of the effects of issues on party preferences, which become weaker. These general findings help explain why the effect of left/right on party preferences is weaker in post-communist democracies than in more established democracies. Our proposition is empirically substantiated in a two-stage analysis using the European Election Study 2009. Keywords: Issues, Left/Right, Elections, East Central Europe, Voters, EU Member States

Does the perceived EU politicization affect election results? A study of four western European countries

The Politicization of the European Union. From Processes to Consequences., 2022

Since the acceleration of the European integration, scholars have studied how this process might have affected both political competition and voters’ attitudes. Yet, apart from individual-level explanations of party choice, there is still little evidence about how EU politicisation affects the overall outcomes of an election. This chapter wants to shed light on this issue by exploring whether a higher EU party polarisation – as perceived by voters – increases the aggregate success of Eurosceptic parties, vis-à- vis their mainstream alternatives. We do this by means of a survey-based simulation strategy, where respondents’ electoral choices are estimated under different scenarios in which the perceived divergence between parties on EU integration is statistically manipulated. Thanks to this strategy, it will be possible to observe whether stronger polarisation results in a wider success of actors that are radically critical of EU policies at the aggregate level. Analyses will rely on linear regressions on data from the 2019 European Election Voter Study (EES) reshaped in stacked format.

AN ANALYSIS OF THE 2014 EUROPEAN UNION ELECTIONS

During the last election campaign the European Union member states’ billboards had been decorated with a slogan: “This time it’s different.” Why were the 2014 EP elections different? Was it really different this time? Or were there some other concerns behind this slogan? Research question is whether the May 2014 EP elections indicate that the European integration project faces any problems due to Euroscepticism or voter turnout. This paper seeks to answer this question by analyzing the election results and voter turnout.

Context Matters: Economic Voting in the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament Elections

2016

Using the 2009 and 2014 European Election Studies (EES), we explore the effect of the economy on the vote in the 2009 and 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections. The paper demonstrates that the economy did influence voters in both contests. However, its impact was heterogeneous across the two elections and between countries. While assessments of the economy directly motivated voters in 2009 by 2014 economic appraisals were conditioned by how much responsibility voters felt the national government had for the state of the economy, implying a shift in calculus between the two elections. The analysis suggests that voters in 2009 were simply reacting to the economic tsunami that was the Global Financial Crisis, with motivations primarily driven by the unfavourable economic conditions countries faced. But in 2014, evaluations were conditioned by judgments about responsibility for the economy, suggesting a more conscious holding to account of the government. Our paper also reveals crosscountry differences in the influence of the economy on vote. Attribution of responsibility and economic evaluations had a more potent impact on support for the government in bailout countries compared to non-bailout countries in 2014. Our findings demonstrate the importance of economy on vote in EP elections but also highlight how its impact on vote can vary based on context.