Impact of issues on party performance

European Parliament (EP) elections are traditionally analysed and interpreted according to the second order model (Reif and Schmitt 1980; van der Eijk and Franklin 1996): EP elections are second order contests characterized by low turnout (Franklin 2001) and driven by domestic factors (de Vreese et al. 2006). Such contexts, furthermore, offer a platform for new parties to emerge, they tend to favour small rather than big parties and, finally, they are likely to result in electoral losses for governing parties. Since the first direct elections to the European Parliament in 1979, the second-order theory has been tested in the aftermath of each single election (van der Eijk, Franklin and Marsh 1996; Marsh 1998; Schmitt 2005; Schmitt and Teperoglou 2015), and has repeatedly confirmed its conceptual and empirical validity. As regards the main characteristics of a second-order election, lower turnout is the one that is most strictly linked to the lower saliency of EP elections. This feature has been explained by relying on a small number of structural factors (Franklin 2001), which are not related to the EU dimension. For instance, scholars have shown that saliency of EP elections depends also on the time of national electoral cycles in which they occur: EP elections are more important when they take place shortly before a national parliamentary election, at which time they gain an importance as 'barometers' of national party standings (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996). Compared to other second-order elections (e.g. local elections), nevertheless, EP elections share with first-order elections an important feature: they are both held at the national level. Party competition at national level has been interpreted by some scholars in terms of issue competition (Carmines and Stimson 1980; Green-Pedersen 2007). According to the second-order perspective, the impact of issues on EP elections should be mostly related to domestic factors (de Vreese et al., 2006). Consequently it has traditionally been maintained that these elections had no European issue content (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996). However, more recently scholars started to question some of the second order features, especially trying to show the increasing importance of supranational elements in EP elections (Bellucci, Garzia and Rubal 2010; Trechsel 2010; Hix and Marsh 2011; Shuck et al. 2011; Hobolt and Spoon 2012). In this contribution, we support the argument of a “growing Europeanness of European elections” (Trechsel, De Sio and Garzia 2017) through empirical analyses which take into account the role played by shared issues among EU member states in explaining party performances. By taking as a reference point the previous parliamentary elections, we first demonstrate the lower relevance and predictive power of the second-order model for analysing party performance when issues are not taken into account; then, we show that party gains and losses – compared to previous national elections – can be significantly explained by party stances on the same issues across the 28 EU countries, showing signs of a perhaps new emergence of a common European debate, structured around a few key issues; nevertheless, relevant differences emerge when the main geographical areas of the EU are taken into account.