Preferences and Electoral Behaviour in the European Political Space

European integration was considered a virtually depoliticized topic; a "permissive consensus," according to Lindberg and Scheingold (1970), ensured that technocratic and political elites were always able to develop and implement further integration steps of the European Communities/ Union. On the other hand, the political public pursued the integration of Europe only as a secondary issue; they accepted the integration-oriented policies of their respective governments or at least conceded to them. The expansion and the institutional transformation of the communities within the European Union have caused an erosion of the "permissive consensus." The Union has become a visible, influential and thus contentious actor in virtually any policy field. The conflictual politicization of the integration project, which Hooghe and Marks (2008) have labeled as "constraining dissensus", are characterized by partly dramatic incursions in the support of the European Union, the party politically charged integration themes and the institutional crisis of the Union subsequent to the constitutional referendums in France and the Netherlands. Public polls, the evaluation of party strategies and the analysis of the political behaviour during European elections or referendums provide a heterogeneous, often contradictory image, and the relevant literature lacks a systematic analysis that is based in equal measure on the development and change in political preferences and on political behaviour in the "European Political Space", and that offers an integrated, systematic explanatory model for preference formation and political behaviour. The proposed project therefore has three important objectives/ basic research goals: 1. The causal analysis of the relationship between voter and party positions (the linkage model): The assumption of euroskeptical or integration oriented positions is explained in literature by socioeconomic and/ or cultural factors. The project places a further emphasis on the analysis of the interaction between voter and party positions and the determination of context requirements for the responsivity of political elites to voter preferences and/ or the effectiveness of party political signals. 2. The explanation of the behaviour of voters and party elites during elections to the European Parliament (the micro-level model): In the context of a systematic stocktaking of the political representation and the interactive relationship between voters and party positions, elections to the European Parliament will be systematically analyzed. A "Spatial Voting" model allows the determination of the alternative explanatory power of utility assessments at the national (left/ right) and the European level (integration/ independence), and to formulate an integrated model of preference formation and voting decisions. 3. The assessment of national-level context factors that affect electoral behavior, preference formation, and voter- party linkage (the "macro-level model"): Causal heterogeneity across space and time will be attributed to context factors like varieties of capitalism, real economic development, the salience of European integration issues, and features of the party system and political competition.

The state of the art posits that European elections are not dominated by genuinely European issues and by the desire to affect the composition of the European Parliament (EP). Instead, national politics and the performance of the respective national governments are the core theme of the campaigns and the key to understanding electoral behaviour. Elections to the EP are therefore, in comparison to elections to the national parliaments, at best (national) political contests of second order. In empirical analyses, this is regularly illustrated by the inspection of aggregated vote shares of political parties: Large, centrist, incumbent parties tend to lose, and small, extremist or euroskeptic actors tend to win votes in EP elections. These vote shifts between national and European elections tend to be more abrupt when EP elections are held at a domestic midterm and national governments are at an alleged popularity low.The results of our projects have indeed verified these empirical regularities, but we provide some alternative explanations, which rest on a more appropriate and elaborate research design. Our central theoretical building blocks are adapted from the spatial theory of voting and the key finding is that the anomalies of EP elections are much more strongly related to European issues than previously assumed. Voters use different criteria to evaluate political parties on a common ideological scale ranging from left to right and when they focus on more specific party positions towards European integration: On the common left-right scale, vote choice and party competition are centripetal; voters like those parties or lists, with which they have the largest ideological overlap. On the more specific European integration dimension, vote choice and party competition are dominated by centrifugal incentives; voters like parties or lists that assume positions that are more extreme than their personal ideal points. These effects are driven by two different causal mechanisms: Many voters want to ensure that their preferences regarding European integration may not be watered down by the complex checks and balances in the political system of the European Union; other voters perceive European integration as matter of symbolic policy and, often without any specific reasoning, assume strong binary preferences for or against Europe and its institutional form, the European Union.Alongside these core findings derived from spatial modelling, we have demonstrated that electoral behaviour in EP elections may only be accounted for by a multifaceted approach. In our publications, we have demonstrated that the sociodemographic properties of a voter, long-standing ties to specific political parties and more current aspects like the evaluation of economic developments are also core motives of vote choice in EP elections.