When the Cat Is Away the Mice will Play: Why Elections to the European Parliament Are about Europe after All

Elections to the European Parliament (EP) are only nominally about Europe. Domestic concerns, and not the future of the integration process, dominate the public agenda even in these EU-wide contests. This is at least the conclusion one could draw from 30 years of research on ‘second-order elections’. In recent years, however, scholars have begun to contest the second-order paradigm; voting behavior in EP elections seems to reflect a mixture of domestic and ‘European’ concerns. Here I try to show that such a compromise solution misses the very point behind the second-order argument. Even if ‘Europe’ often matters for voting behavior, the degree of this influence depends on the dynamics of domestic party competition. I provide evidence that approaching elections to national parliaments remove preferences on integration from the vote function. National governments as the decisive actors in the European Council are still elected in European vacuo. By contrast, attention to the integration process appears to be highest in midterm elections to the EP that is not entitled to intervene in matters of institutional design. Reasons for this apparent paradox are discussed.