Suchergebnisse

The Lisbon Treaty introduced key institutional changes to increase the relevance of elections to the European Parliament (EP). Among these was the 'Spitzenkandidaten process', which was introduced with the aim to increase the visibility of the EP elections and mobilise more citizens to turnout to vote. This article investigates the effect that the debates among the Lead Candidates had on voters' perceptions about candidates and policy issues. To do this, we administered a two-wave panel online survey to a sample of students from different European universities prior to the Spitzenkandidaten debates and directly after them, following the logic of a quasi-experimental research design. Following a difference-in-differences approach, we gauge the extent to which those respondents who were exposed to the debates increased their degree of information about the candidates and changed their perceptions about the candidates and their policy positions. The findings reveal that respondents who followed the debate felt significantly more informed to make up their minds about the candidates as well as to make their vote decisions, and show that the debate slightly improved their perceptions of the policy positions of those candidates who they had intended to vote for.

The salience assigned to the European Constitution and the positions on it taken by national parties during the 2004 European Parliament elections are the focus of this paper. To explore these issues, we use party manifestos, expert data on party positions, and public opinion survey data from Eurobarometer. Through content analysis of the manifestos we find that the Constitution has been politicised and contested. In countries where the issue has been put in the spotlight by one or more parties, other parties also have had to take a position. The positions parties have taken on the Constitution are related to their overall position on European integration, whether or not they participated in the Constitutional Convention, and their left/right stance.

A large number of delegates from different institutional levels within the EU have achieved a remarkable consensus on a draft constitution. Has this consensus been made possible because the nationally predominant left–right divide was only weakly present during the deliberations of the delegates? Left–right differences have been analysed by means of a content analysis on submitted documents during the European Convention. The data analysis confirms our assumption that the left–right distinction was relevant, although not very dominant. The draft constitution did not take a mean position on left and right issues, but in fact puts more emphasis on substantial goals related to both left and right, giving an equal weight to both anti-poles. However, if we exclude the Charter of Human Rights, the draft constitution appears to be strongly tilted to the right. The analysis also shows that party family differences did affect the process of coalition building during the Convention, since more than half of all documents have been submitted together with at least one member of the same party family and/or with one family member close by. Our analysis also indicates that the process of consensus building was enhanced by the absence of many extremist and new parties during the Convention. This may have enhanced agreement on the Constitution, but later it became problematic for the domestic democratic process and for the acceptance of the Constitution in some countries, such as France and the Netherlands, especially since some of the excluded parties have actively and successfully mobilised voters to vote against the Constitution.