Michael Marsh

Testing the Second-Order Election Model after Four European Elections

Reif and Schmitt argued that elections to the European Parliament should be understood as second-order national elections, and advanced several predictions about the results of such elections. Those concerning the impact of government status, party size, party character and the national election cycle on electoral performance are examined here using data on four sets of European Parliament elections. In addition, the consequences of European Parliament elections for the next national election are explored. The analysis demonstrates the validity of most of Reif and Schmitts original propositions, and further refines their analysis of the relationship between European and subsequent national elections. However, all propositions hold much more effectively in countries where alternation in government is the norm, suggesting that the distinction between first-order and second-order elections may not be so clear cut as Reif and Schmitt imagined.

Referendum Outcomes and Trust in Government: Public Support for Europe in the Wake of Maastricht

The referenda conducted in France and Denmark in 1992 to ratify the Maastricht Treaty are often seen as giving evidence of ‘true’ attitudes towards Europe. In this paper we dispute this assumption, presenting evidence that shows referenda in Parliamentary systems with disciplined party governments to be subject to what we call a ‘lockstep’ phenomenon in which referendum outcomes become tied to the popularity of the government in power, even if the ostensible subject of the referendum has little to do with the reasons for government popularity (or lack of popularity). In the case of the Maastricht referenda in France and Denmark, the apparent unpopularity of the European project in fact appears to have been nothing of the kind, but instead to have reflected the unpopularity of ruling parties in both countries. A referendum conducted at about the same time in Ireland, where the government was more popular, achieved a handsome majority, as did the referendum conducted a year later in Denmark after a more pop...

Punishment or Protest? Understanding European Parliament Elections

After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.

What Voters Teach Us about Europe-Wide Elections. What Europe-Wide Elections Teach us about Voters

Abstract 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.

‘Second-order’ versus ‘Issue-voting’ Effects in EU Referendums Evidence from the Irish Nice Treaty Referendums

Are referendums on EU treaties decided by voters’ attitudes to Europe (the ‘issue-voting’ explanation) or by voters’ attitudes to their national political parties and incumbent national government (the ‘second-order election model’ explanation)? In one scenario, these referendums will approximate to deliberative processes that will be decided by people’s views of the merits of European integration. In the other scenario, they will be plebiscites on the performance of national governments. We test the two competing explanations of the determinants of voting in EU referendums using evidence from the two Irish referendums on the Nice Treaty. We find that the issue-voting model outperforms the second-order model in both referendums. However, we also find that issue-voting was particularly important in the more salient and more intense second referendum. Most strikingly, attitudes to EU enlargement were much stronger predictors of vote at Nice 2 than at Nice 1. This finding about the rise in importance of attitudes to the EU points to the importance of campaigning in EU referendums.

Attitudes toward Europe and referendum votes: A response to Siune and Svensson

In their article in Electoral Studies (Volume 12 Number 2) of June 1993, Karen Siune and Palle Svensson argue that, during the run-up to the Danish referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in May 1992, the development of opinion leading to the ultimate rejection of the treaty was due to the Danish people’s reluctance to follow the advice of their usual party ‘if this advice is contrary to their own point of view’ (1993, p. 106). This is an important finding, for it suggests that the public is more knowledgeable, attentive, and informed than is generally assumed, even about issues that are outside what is generally considered to be their sphere of competence. Although the suggestion is in line with recent fmdings that the ‘minimalist’ view of the quality of public opinion was overdrawn (Sniderman, Brody, and Tetlock, 1991) and that public opinion can change in quite rational ways as circumstances change (e.g. Carmines and Stimson, 1989; Peffley and Hurwitz, 1992; Wlezien and Goggin, 1993), it takes us beyond what has so far been established. However, before we conclude that a new level of rationality was shown by the Danish public in 1992, we should consider the possibility of a more prosaic explanation. In domains of low salience, such as foreign policy, we might expect opinions to be coupled to those in domains of high salience, such as governments’ handling of the economy. Indeed, this expectation was spelled out in regard to European attitudes by Ronald Inglehart as long ago as 1971 when he suggested that opinions about Europe would be easily overlaid by short-term national considerations (Inglehart, 1971). Perhaps, after all, the Maastricht referendum in Denmark was really a referendum on the performance of the national government. Table 1 shows the relationship between government approval and support for the Maastricht treaty in all three countries in which referendums were held in 1992, * We are grateful to Roland Cayrol, Andrew Appleton, and Torben Worre for providing us with French and Danish opinion poll data.

The Attribution of Credit and Blame to Governments and Its Impact on Vote Choice

This article examines how voters attribute credit and blame to governments for policy success and failure, and how this affects their party support. Using panel data from Britain between 1997 and 2001 and Ireland between 2002 and 2007 to model attribution, the interaction between partisanship and evaluation of performance is shown to be crucial. Partisanship resolves incongruities between party support and policy evaluation through selective attribution: favoured parties are not blamed for policy failures and less favoured ones are not credited with policy success. Furthermore, attributions caused defections from Labour over the 1997–2001 election cycle in Britain, and defections from the Fianna Fail/Progressive Democrat coalition over the 2002–07 election cycle in Ireland. Using models of vote switching and controlling for partisanship to minimize endogeneity problems, it is shown that attributed evaluations affect vote intention much more than unattributed evaluations. This result holds across several policy areas and both political systems.

Candidates or Parties? : Objects of Electoral Choice in Ireland

Under many electoral systems, voters can choose between candidates, and, under some systems, between candidates of the same party — a situation that makes it possible for candidates to seek a personal vote. Studies of some countries have shown how personal voting is apparent in the success of particular types of candidates, notably incumbents, but there is little systematic study of personal motives among the electors themselves. The single transferable vote system (STV) used in Ireland certainly allows electors to choose between candidates as well as parties and therefore is seen as providing a strong incentive for candidates to seek personal votes. While aggregate evidence from election results has pointed to the primary importance of party, survey data have suggested that close to a majority of voters are primarily candidate-centred. In this article, an extensive set of instruments contained in the 2002 Irish election study is used to explore the extent to which voters decide on candidate-centred factors as opposed to party-centred factors. It is shown that a substantial minority decide on the basis of candidate factors, and typical models of Irish electoral behaviour have not accommodated the heterogeneity that results from this mix of motives. However, direct questions about motives probably underestimate the extent of party-centred voting.

Voting and Protesting: Explaining Citizen Participation in Old and New European Democracies

This article analyses the differences and similarities in citizen participation between the new democracies of central and eastern Europe and the established democracies of the west. Citizens in the post-communist countries participate less in politics than their western neighbours. The article asks why this is the case and finds that no satisfactory answers have been offered in the literature so far. Developing a set of propositions about the factors that explain participation differences between old and new European democracies it shows that only a small part of the difference in political engagement is due to regional variation in the socio-demographic, attitudinal, and mobilization-related characteristics of citizens. The analysis also finds that, while the factors explaining election turnout have a largely similar impact in old and new democracies, the causes of protest participation, in particular those relating to left-right semantics, are significantly different between the two sets of countries. While many components of tried-and-tested models of political participation work equally well in new and old democracies, some of the differences in political engagement cannot be accounted for without reference to contextual variables specific to the post-communist democracies, in particular the different pre-democratic regime types and modes of the transition process.

Political representation in the European Parliament

The political structure of the European Union is experiencing a period of critical change, as leaders seek to address the twin problems of the ‘democratic deficit’ and institutional effectiveness in the Intergovernmental Conference. Problems of governance, already serious, have become more urgent, and will be further compounded by increasing EU powers and subsequent waves of European enlargement. The widely recognised danger is that the expansion of the European Union will be threatened by a growing crisis of democratic legitimation and of effective governance (Andersen & Eliassen 1996; Hayward 1995). All the articles in this special issue focus on the relationship between citizens and Members of the European Parliament. The aim is to examine the effectiveness of alternative channels of representation, and the way weak linkages contribute towards the democratic deficit within the Union. To understand the problems of democratic legitimacy in the Union we need to unpack the concept of ‘political representation’, which has a number of multifaceted and complex dimensions (Thomassen 1994; Holmberg 1989; Eulau & Wahlke 1978; Birch 1971; Pitkin 1967). Ideas of representation reflect different assumptions about the nature of democracy, the most appropriate linkages between citizens and the state, and the role of legislators.