Learning about the unknown Spitzenkandidaten: The role of media exposure during the 2019 European Parliament elections

The Spitzenkandidaten were meant to personalize European Parliament elections. 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. Combining panel surveys and online tracking data, the study explores candidate learning during the German 2019 European Parliament election campaign and relates learning to different types of news exposure, 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 offline news helped to acquire knowledge. The findings imply that Spitzenkandidaten stick to voters’ minds when they get exposed to them, but that exposure is infrequent in high-choice media environments.

Bargaining power in informal trilogues: Intra-institutional preference cohesion and inter-institutional bargaining success

Informal trilogue meetings are the main legislative bargaining forum in the European Union, yet their dynamics remain largely understudied in a quantitative context. This article builds on the assumption that the negotiating delegations of the European Parliament and the Council play a two-level game whereby these actors can use their intra-institutional constraint to extract inter-institutional bargaining success. Negotiators can credibly claim that their hands are tied if the members of their parent institutions hold similar preferences and do not accept alternative proposals or if their institution is divided and negotiators need to defend a fragile compromise. Employing a measure of document similarity (minimum edit distance) between an institution's negotiation mandate and the trilogue outcome to measure bargaining success, the analysis supports the hypothesis for the European Parliament, but not for the Council.

United or divided in diversity? The heterogeneous effects of ethnic diversity on European and national identities

In this article, we argue that the size and cultural proximity of immigrant populations in people's residential surroundings shape national and European identities. This means that the type of migrant population activates cultural threat perceptions and opportunities for contact to varying degrees. Geocoded survey data from the Netherlands suggests that large non-Western immigrant shares are associated with more exclusive national identities, while mixed contexts with Western and non-Western populations show more inclusive identities. These results suggest that highly diverse areas with mixed immigrant populations hold a potential for more tolerance. In contrast, exclusive national identities become strongly pronounced under the presence of sizeable culturally distant immigrant groups.

Introducing COMEPELDA: Comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions.

The cultural origins of institutional trust: The case of the European Central Bank

Does culture have a causal effect on institutional trust? We answer this question by assessing the non-economic determinants of public trust in the European Central Bank. To analyse institutional trust, we employ a novel dataset of citizen perceptions and knowledge about the European Central Bank. Cultural traits are measured by indicators of social trust at the level of Euro area sub-national regions. We show that individuals living in regions with lower social trust systematically exhibit less trust in the European Central Bank. An instrumental variable approach based on historical variables of education and political institutions supports a causal interpretation of our findings. These results are robust across different model specifications and measures of trust.

Understanding leader evaluations in European Parliament elections

Leader evaluations are a crucial aspect in representative democracy. We analyse the patterns, antecedents and consequences of European Union leader evaluations against the backdrop of the 2019 European Parliament elections in ten countries. The article shows, firstly, that leader evaluations are unidimensional, both among voters with low and high knowledge as well as partisans and non-partisans. Secondly, among the antecedents of leader evaluations, European Union trust and performance evaluations are positively associated with leader evaluations, while European identity hardly plays a role compared to other factors. Lastly, the positive effect of leader evaluations on vote choice is conditional upon the individual leader and their party affiliation. Our results have important implications for expectations towards and evaluations of European Union leadership in the long term.

Discrimination against mobile European Union citizens before and during the first COVID-19 lockdown: Evidence from a conjoint experiment in Germany

One of the greatest achievements of the EU is the freedom of movement between member states offering citizens equal rights in EU member states. EU enlargement and the COVID-19 pandemic allow for a critical test of whether EU citizens are indeed treated equally in practice. We test preferential treatment of EU citizens in two hypothetical choice experiments in Germany at two different time points: in the period before and during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. Theories of responses to threat suggest that the COVID-19 crisis should increase discrimination against mobile EU citizens. While our findings reveal sizeable discrimination based on nationality and language proficiency of mobile EU citizens, the findings also suggest that, contrary to expectations, discrimination did not increase in the initial COVID-19 crisis period.

Electoral responses to the increased contestation over European integration. The European Elections of 2019 and beyond

This special issue focuses on the consequences of the heightened conflict between member states and increased politicization of European affairs for electoral politics in the European Union. In this introduction we begin by outlining three important developments that fuelled the politicization: (a) the common currency; (b) the increased pushback on the EU’s open border policies; and (c) the inability of the EU to prevent democratic backsliding in some countries. We then discuss their consequences for EU elections, particularly campaigns, public opinion on Europe and voter behaviour, which are investigated against the backdrop of the 2019 European Parliament elections in the individual articles in this special issue. This introduction provides a contextual framework for these contributions and reflects upon some of its main findings.

Analysing how crises shape mass and elite preferences and behaviour in the European Union

The COVID-19 pandemic proved the latest stress test for the European Union, after Brexit, the Eurozone crisis and the large influx of refugees. This highly relevant and well-timed special issue examines how past crises have left an imprint on the opinions and behaviour of ordinary citizens and political elites regarding the European Union. This Forum article reviews the special issue contributions by spelling out which lessons we can learn from each of them and which paths for future research they have opened up. In terms of a path forward, I argue that scholars ought to pay more attention to (a) the role of political elites, (b) political opportunity structures, and (c) heterogeneity both between and within member states.

In varietate concordia?! Political parties’ digital political marketing in the 2019 European Parliament election campaign

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of how parties across 28 countries use digital political marketing on Facebook by drawing on the example of the 2019 European Parliament election. We introduce a theoretical model of political Facebook marketing and compare the paid media activity (sponsored posts, ads) of 186 parties to their owned media (posts) and earned media (user reactions, comments, shares). Our results concerning cross-country patterns indicate that differences in European parties’ paid media activity exist and only a few parties leverage sophisticated targeting strategies. Regarding temporal dynamics, we find that paid media is used to supplement owned media during similar campaign phases. In terms of engagement-triggering effects, we show that sponsoring posts is a suitable tool to increase earned media. Overall, paid media activity on Facebook is largely embedded into parties’ overall marketing strategy and national countries’ regulatory settings. Our results have implications for the understanding of public opinion, voting behaviour and the regulations of elections in modern European democracies.