Mikko Mattila

Why bother? Determinants of turnout in the European elections

Abstract This article analyses turnout in the European Parliamentary elections. Turnout is affected partly by the same factors that affect turnout in normal national elections and partly by factors related to the EU. The results show that most of the cross-country variation in turnout can be explained by the same variables as in national elections. Compulsory voting, weekend voting and having other elections simultaneously with EP elections increase turnout. Also some EU specific factors affect turnout, but their effect is smaller. Voters in countries benefiting from the EU subsidies vote more actively than voters in the countries that pay these subsidies. Furthermore, turnout is higher in countries with strong support for the EU membership. Holding elections during weekends and having multiple constituencies in all countries could increase the turnout by approximately 10 percentage points.

Cautious Voters -Supportive Parties

This article analyses party-voter congruence on European integration matters in the EU member states. Drawing on existing research, we put forward eight hypotheses which are tested with data from the EES2004 survey. We show that parties are closer to their voters on the left/right dimension than on the EU dimension. Parties are also more supportive of European integration than are their voters. Party system characteristics (number of parties, ideological range) did not affect opinion congruence. The responsiveness analysis at the party level shows that government parties were less responsive than opposition parties; party size was related to responsiveness, with opinion congruence higher in smaller parties; and responsiveness was lower among centrist parties. Voters are also better represented on the EU dimension by their parties in the new than in the older EU member states. This difference may result from the EU occupying a more central place on the political agendas of the new member states.

Drifting Further Apart: National Parties and their Electorates on the EU Dimension

Whether parties are representative of their voters over the EU is a key concern in modern European governance. Using European Election Studies data, this article compares opinion congruence between parties and their electorates on the EU dimension in 2004 and 2009 and examines, at the levels of both member states and individual parties, which factors explain variation in opinion congruence between parties and their supporters over integration. The article shows that parties have become less representative of their voters and that they adopt more convergent positions on the EU dimension than their voters. Congruence is higher in smaller parties and in ideologically more extremist left-wing parties. Overall parties are thus drifting further apart from their voters on the EU dimension.

Voting and Coalitions in the Council after the Enlargement

Prior to the accession of ten new member states into the European Union in 2004 and of two additional members in 2007, some researchers were concerned that the enlarged Union, and particularly its major legislative organ the Council of Ministers, would be threatened by a gridlock. The rules for decision-making in the enlarged Union were decided in the Nice summit and subsequently codified in the Treaty of Nice. These rules increased the relative voting power of bigger member states at the expense of smaller member states. However, at the same time, the qualified majority voting (QMV) threshold required for the adoption of QMV proposals was raised, which prompted some researchers to forecast problems for future Council decision-making in an enlarged Union (Baldwin et al. 2001; Felsenthal and Machover 2001).

Money Makes the EU Go Round: The Objective Foundations of Conflict in the Council of Ministers

Many examinations of the dimensions of conflict in the European Union Council of Ministers focus on the ideological roots of contestation in the EU. This article examines the extent to which structural attributes of the Member States explain the conflict within the Council of Ministers in general as well as in selected policy domains (agriculture, fisheries, environment, economic affairs). Drawing on the political economy literature of legislative decision-making, a multilevel analysis shows that country-level redistributive interests shape the interactions considerably and in some of the policy domains that are examined in more detail. The impact of ideological variables like the left-right positioning of the Member State governments remains inconsistent and marginal in this analysis.

The Hard Business of Balancing Budgets: A Study of Public Finances in Seventeen OECD Countries

During the past two decades growing public sectors and simultaneous slow economic growth have highlighted the role of deficit management as a central part of economic policies in modern democracies. Both economists and political scientists have emphasized the role of political institutions in public financial policies. This study contributes to this growing body of research by showing that: (1) during election years public deficits increase because governments refrain from raising taxes; (2) multi-party governments are no more prone to deficit problems than one-party governments but they are more likely to raise both public expenditure and revenue; (3) in achieving deficit reductions, one-party governments with decentralized labour markets emphasize expenditure cuts while multi-party governments with centralized labour markets raise taxes; and (4) as a consequence, the highest tax rates can be found in countries with centralized labour markets, especially if labour market centralization is combined with multi-party government.

Government Formation in the Nordic Countries: The Electoral Connection

Government formation is guided by several principles, such as majority, plurality and electoral principles. According to the electoral principle, parties that increase their share of seats in the elections should form the government, parties that lose seats joining the opposition. We analyse the fulfilment of this principle in the five Nordic countries. In Denmark, Finland and Iceland the majority of governments contained parties that both won and lost in elections, whereas in Sweden nearly half of the governments included only parties that lost seats. Only in Iceland and Denmark does election success translate to an increased probability of a government place in an increasing way. In Norway and particularly in Sweden big losers have better chances of being in government than big winners. Party system attributes are not related to the fulfilment of the electoral principle. To shift our analysis to individual parties, prime ministers come more likely from parties that are big winners. Winning does not explain the probability of becoming a coalition partner. If a party wants to be in government it is more important to avoid losing seats than to be an actual winner. Coalition partners are more likely to be mid–sized parties, a finding probably explained by the desire of the formateur party to maximise its policy influence in the government.

Hierarchy or Competition?: The Interest Representation Network of Organized Labour in Finnish Social and Health Policy Making

In this article the network of interest representation of Finnish labour organizations in the social and health policy domain was analysed More precisely the research question was whether the interest representation follows the hierarchical or the competitive model of interest channelling The first model shared many features of the corporatist theory of interest representation The competition model was derived more from pluralist policy-making theories The results indicated that the interest representation in this domain was more hierarchically structured This result gives some support to the meso level corporatist hypothesis, which claims that macro-level corporatist arrangements are replicated also in sectoral level decision-making

Resolving controversies with DEU data

In many respects the publication of Robert Thomson’s (2011) new book Resolving Controversy in the European Union (hereafter RCEU) can be seen as a culmination of the Decision-Making in the European Union (DEU) project that started more than a decade ago. Thomson’s book is a successful attempt to use the DEU data to provide a systematic and cohesive analysis of how the European Union manages to convert competing policy demands into legislative outputs in its decision-making process. Thus, the aim of the book is ambitious: to provide a comprehensive analytical examination of the way decision-making works in the European Union. The goal of my evaluation in this forum article is twofold. Robert Thomson has been one of the key members of the DEU project from the beginning and the DEU data set forms an important part of Thomson’s empirical analysis. Therefore, in the first part of this article I present an evaluation of the significance of the DEU project for EU studies in general. Then I proceed to discuss the new book in more detail. I will focus on Thomson’s general approach and main findings, trying to highlight why this book is such an important addition to our knowledge of how the EU works.

How voter turnout varies between different chronic conditions? A population-based register study

Background While poor self-rated health is known to decrease an individuals propensity to vote, disaggregation of the components of health on turnout has thus far received only little attention. This study deepens on the understanding of such relationships by examining the association between chronic diseases and voting. Methods The study uses an individual-level register-based data set that contains an 11% random sample of the entire electorate in the 1999 Finnish parliamentary elections. With information on hospital discharge diagnoses and reimbursements for drugs prescribed, we identify persons with chronic hospital-treated diseases (coronary heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma, depression, cancer, psychotic mental disease, diabetes, cerebrovascular disease, rheumatic disease, epilepsy, arthrosis, alcoholism, dementia, atherosclerosis, Parkinsons disease, other degenerative brain diseases, multiple sclerosis and kidney disease). Results After adjusting for gender, age, education, occupational class, income, partnership status, cohabitation with underaged children and hospitalisation during Election Day, neurodegenerative brain diseases had the strongest negative relationship with voting (dementia OR=0.20, 95% CI 0.18 to 0.22; others up to OR=0.70). Alcoholism (OR=0.66) and mental disorders also had a negative association (depression OR=0.91; psychotic mental disease OR=0.79), whereas cancer and COPD/asthma had a positive association (both OR=1.05). Having more than one condition at a time further decreased voting probability. Conclusions By showing how different health conditions are related to voter turnout, this study provides essential information for identifying gaps in the potential for political participation and for further inquiries aiming to develop models that explain the link between health and voting probability.