1st Edition

European Parliament Elections after Eastern Enlargement

Edited By Hermann Schmitt Copyright 2010
    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    168 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book reflects on the questions raised by the European Election Study 2004 whose analytical focus was on the legitimacy of EU politics after Eastern enlargement. It also assesses the dynamics and the contents of the campaign, on the determinants of the extremely low turnout in the new countries, and on the reasons of voter choice in West and East.

    The book also examines the first European Parliament election after the post-communist countries of Eastern Europe joined the European Union. The central question is: what has changed? Are the voters in the new member countries different and if so, why? Did the Union suffer from a loss of democratic legitimacy after Eastern enlargement?

    Each chapter is empirical-analytical; most are based on the post-election surveys of the group that were conducted in all but one of the 25 member countries, others focus on the results of content analyses of news media and party manifestos.

    This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Integration.

    1. The news coverage of the 2004 European election campaign in 25 countries, Claes de Vreese (University of Amsterdam)

    2. Turning out or turning off? How the EP election of 2004 shed light on turnout dynamics, Mark N. Franklin (EUI Florence) and Bernhard Wessels (WZB Berlin)

    3. The Nature of European Issues, Hermann Schmitt (MZES U of Mannheim)

    4. Left-right and the European Parliament vote in 2004, Marina Costa Lobo, André Freire and Pedro Magalhaes (ISCTE Lisbon)

    5. Information effects on vote choices in European elections, Gabor Toka (CEU Budapest)

    6. Public support for integration in the newly enlarged EU: Exploring differences between former communist countries and established member-countries, James Tilley (Jesus College Oxford) and John Garry (U of Belfast)

    7. The support base of radical right parties in the states of the enlarged European Union, Wouter van der Brug and Meindert Fennema (Amsterdam) erinnert 19/1/09 OK

    8. Dynamics in European political identity, Angelika Scheuer (GESIS Mannheim) and Hermann Schmitt (MZES, U of Mannheim)

    9. Second-order elections vs. first-order thinking: How voters perceive the representation process in a multi-level system of governance, Robert Rohrschneider and Nick Clark (University of Indiana at Bloomington)

    10. Saying and doing (something else?): Does EP roll call voting reflect manifesto content? Andreas M. Wüst (MZES, U of Mannheim)

    11. Dimensions of Party Competition in the EU Member Countries, Cees van der Eijk (U of Nottingham)

    Biography

    Hermann Schmitt is a research fellow of the MZES and a Privatdozent for Political Science at the University of Mannheim. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan (1996-7), Science Po Paris (2001-2), the Australian National University (2003), the IAS in Vienna (2005), and the UAM in Madrid (2008). He received his doctorate from the University of Duisburg, and his first habilitation from the Free University of Berlin. He has been participating in a number of comparative projects; perhaps most important is his involvement, from 1979 onwards, in the series of European Election Studies. He is the author and editor of numerous books and articles on electoral behaviour in multilevel-systems and on political parties and political representation in the EU.