Put in the spotlight or largely ignored? Emphasis on the Spitzenkandidaten by political parties in their online campaigns for European elections

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the debate about the introduction of the Spitzenkandidaten (lead candidates) in the 2014 European Parliament (EP) election. Focusing on parties’ efforts to make the candidates visible to voters, we argue that the multi-level character of these elections creates large differences concerning individual parties’ incentives to promote the Spitzenkandidaten in their campaigns. Analysing a novel dataset of campaign communication on Facebook, we find that only a few parties highlighted them, while many did not. In line with our theoretical argument, this variation is systematic and can be attributed to lacking incentives for most parties. Especially nominating a candidate at the European level only has a modest positive effect on national parties’ willingness to put the candidates in the spotlight. This lacking commitment to the nominated candidates should be considered in discussions about the reform of the current Spitzenkandidaten system for the 2019 EP elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Elections
• European Parliament
• European Union
• lead candidates
• social media
• Spitzenkandidaten

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Daniela Braun is a postdoctoral researcher at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and External Fellow at the University of Mannheim (MZES).

Tobias Schwarzbözl is a PhD candidate at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich.

Notes

1. Scholars tend to use the German term ‘Spitzenkandidaten’ for these lead candidates.

2. Slogan used in November 2013 on the EP homepage (http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/top-stories/20130902TST18451/this-time-it's-different, last 19 September 2017).

3. We also estimated models with alternative specifications. Using multi-level models with observations nested in countries and parties leads to the same conclusions as presented in the paper (see Appendix D).

4. All our hypotheses make claims about the overall attention parties devote to the Spitzenkandidaten. However, one might argue that the mechanisms behind the derived hypotheses lead to the expectation that a party only or particularly emphasises a specific candidate. Running the same analyses with dependent variables which are sensitive to attention towards specific candidates, corroborates that the mechanisms suggested in our hypotheses are responsible for the effects presented in our main findings (see Appendix E).