The 2009 European Election in Italy: National or European?

Abstract

In June 2009, European citizens voted in the European Parliamentary elections. Despite the relevance of the election, turnout across countries was particularly low. In Italy, too, abstention is growing and this paper aims to explain why. Traditionally, low turnout in European Parliamentary elections is explained by the fact that they are considered second-order elections and, thus, less important than national elections. According to this perspective, national factors are the main cause of lower turnout as compared to national elections. Thus, it is generally considered that low turnout is not related to citizens' support for the European Union or other European attitudes, such as European identity. In this article, this perspective is questioned and other individual factors are considered. In particular, a number of European attitudes are considered as independent variables together with national factors. The findings show that abstention in European Parliamentary elections in Italy is directly linked to citizens' disaffection with politics, rather than disaffection with government performance. Furthermore, attitudes toward the European Union integration project play a role only when the level of political involvement is high. Thus, European questions matter and turnout in European Parliamentary elections is driven not only by national-level factors, but also by citizens' satisfaction with the European Union and sense of European identity.

Key words:

• European vote
• European attitudes
• political involvement
• turnout
• Italy

Notes

¹ A preliminary version of this paper was delivered at the XXV SISP (Italian Society for Political Science) Annual Congress, 8–10 September 2011, University of Palermo.

² The comparison is made with the last national Parliamentary elections.

³ Turnout rates in European elections in all European countries across time are presented in Table 4 (see Appendix).

⁴ The results using the European Election Study are more or less the same.

⁵ This structure has been empirically confirmed through exploratory factor analysis. More details on the reliability of the derived scales are in the Appendix (Table 5).

⁶ The descriptions of the variables and the coding procedure are in Table 5 (see Appendix).

⁷ I prefer to show the odds ratio for a more direct comprehension of the results.