National Vote Intention and European Voting Behavior, 1979-2004: Second Order Election Effects, Election Timing, Government Approval and the Europeanization of European Elections

Voting behavior in elections to the European Parliament seems to follow a regular pattern, as many EP-election studies have found: Parties in government at the national level tend to lose vote shares in EP-elections as compared to the last domestic electoral contest; small and ideologically more extreme parties tend to gain vote shares. These losses and gains seem to be more pronounced when the European election is held in the middle of the domestic legislative term (mid-term effect). In the many accounts that try to explain these regular deviations from domestic voting, one causal factor plays a central role: the popularity loss of parties in office at the national level. Since reliable and comparable popularity data for the EU-member states seems to be missing, the literature has attempted to measure popularity loss with two kinds of proxies: changes in economic performance (e.g. changes in the unemployment rate) and the timing of the EP-election within the domestic term. This paper proposes to use the bi-annually collected national vote intention question of the Eurobarometer surveys as a measurement for party popularity. The paper has three central findings: 1) changes in national vote intention are a strong and stable predictor for the actual vote share shifts between national and European elections, 2) neither the economic nor the election timing variables contribute substantially to the explanation of the vote share shifts; 3) changes in the impact of the national vote intention variable on European election outcomes over the six EPelections held so far suggest that the European electorates have taken European issues more and more into consideration when participating in European elections (Europeanization of EPelections). However, the data also suggests that voters have used these elections increasingly to voice their dissatisfaction with the European integration process (Anti-Europeanization of EPelections).