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Abstract
The Lisbon Treaty (2009) introduced key institutional changes to increase the relevance of elections to the European Parliament (EP). Among others, major political groups nominated different lead candidates, the so-called Spitzenkandidaten, for the 2014 EP elections. The aim of this article is to investigate how national political parties react to this new institutional setting. Using data from the 2014 Euromanifesto study, the article examines if and under what conditions political parties put emphasis on the Spitzenkandidaten system in their party manifestos and whether they take positive or negative stances when talking about it. The findings reveal that parties put little emphasis on the issue. Moreover, the factors promoting the Spitzenkandidaten system suggest that parties decide strategically upon emphasising that topic or take a positive stance on it if they expect to benefit from this.
Notes
1. It is important to note that it is not the EP party groups – and outside parliament, the transnational parties or party federations – that compete for votes in EP elections, but the national political parties. The candidates are nominated by the national political parties of each EU member state separately. Consequently, these actors are running the election campaign and, in the majority of the cases, release their own election programmes ahead of the EP elections – their so-called Euromanifestos (EMs).
2. Scholars generally agree that the parties’ decision on the topics to be addressed in their election campaigns is as important as the position they take towards an issue (Green and Hobolt Citation2008; Green-Pedersen Citation2007; Meguid Citation2008; Wagner and Meyer Citation2014). To understand the reasons why parties, emphasise some issues and neglect others, most researchers go back to the theoretical foundations of salience theory, put forward by Budge and Farlie (Citation1983), as well as issue ownership theory (Petrocik Citation1996; Petrocik et al. Citation2003). Nevertheless, due to the fact that we want to study why and how political parties did deal with the Spitzenkandidaten system, we decided to draw upon a theoretical framework which enables us to explain the genuine party behaviour, instead of the (certainly related) issue emphasis theory.
3. Besides ECR and EFD, non-affiliated parties are also in the same situation.
4. Ideally, we would investigate the role of internal cohesion by exploiting the difference between parties that supported the party candidate during the internal nomination procedure and those who opposed the candidates or abstained from the vote. Unfortunately getting the voting records from each party group for the nomination procedure was not possible either because the party decided not to make the information public (the case of EPP and PES), or parties were not willing to grant us access to the voting records (the case of ALDE and EL), or because the nomination procedure was open to all citizens (the case of the EGP).
5. To be more specific, eight parties belonging to this group, i.e. Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, People’s Movement against the EU, Left Alliance, Left Front Sinn Fein, Socialist Party, Portuguese Communist Party and Left Party, have a score lower than 3 on the EU_POSITION variable (measured on a scale ranging from 0 to 7) in the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey.
6. This can also be the case for parties which have an ambiguous position towards the EU even if they are part of a clear-cut pro-EU EP group (i.e. ALDE, EPP and S&D, the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats).
7. Although one can argue that we do not use an appropriate data source, because the EP groups announced their nominations after the parties drafted the Euromanifestos, this can be refuted since the idea of a new institutional setting including the idea of the Spitzenkandidaten system was already debated years before (Christiansen Citation2016). Consequently, all parties had the chance to cover the topic in their manifestos by pointing to the institutional innovation and not necessarily mentioning the candidate (in case the nomination happened too late). In practice, although being initially among the main promoters of the system, only the EPP announced the nomination of Juncker rather late, in early March 2014 (Put et al. Citation2016), while the other EP groups announced their candidates at least four months before the elections. In the case of PES, it was clear that Martin Schulz was the candidate from early November 2013, ALDE agreed that Guy Verhofstadt would be the only candidate in January 2014, the European Greens also announced in January 2014 their decision to nominate the Ska Keller‒José Bové duo, while the European left nominated Alex Tsipras as their candidate in December 2013. In addition to that, our findings later in the article show that parties devote a similar level of attention to both specific mention and the general mention of the system (the 37 parties that mentioned the Spitzenkandidaten topic devote on average 0.36% of the total space of their manifestos to specific mentions of candidates and 0.27% to general mentions of the issue). Furthermore, the same factors drive parties to mention both the specific candidates and the topic in general (see results in Online Appendices 5 and 6). Hence, we strongly consider that the time of nomination cannot explain the low salience of the topic among parties competing in the European Parliament elections.
8. Two different coding categories with their respective positive and negative occurrences were available: ‘040801 Spitzenkandidaten general’ (positive: favourable mentions of their general role in the EU; negative: negative mentions of their general role in the EU); ‘040802 Spitzenkandidaten specific’ (positive: favourable mentions of a specific Spitzenkandidaten [i.e. Jean-Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz, Guy Verhofstadt, Ska Keller, José Bové and Alexis Tsipras]; negative: negative mentions of a specific Spitzenkandidaten [i.e. Jean-Claude Juncker, Martin Schulz, Guy Verhofstadt, Ska Keller, José Bové and Alexis Tsipras]).
9. As a sensitivity check, we also use (1) the EP party group a party joined after the 2014 EP elections and (2) the EP group a party belonged to in the 7th European Parliament (in this latter case for parties that did not compete in 2009 EP elections and for parties that did not gain seats after the 2009 EP elections we impute the EP party group they joined after the 2014 EP elections), see Online Appendix 11.
10. We prefer the Chapel Hill Expert Study (CHES) measure to party position measures based on manifestos, given that it is considered a more reliable position of ‘true’ party stances in regard to European integration. Part of the reason for this being the case is that party manifestos are drafted having in mind strategic considerations, hence the position in the manifesto might not be the ‘true’ position of the party but how the party would like to be perceived. In fact, previous studies show that CHES measures outperform the manifesto-based measure of scaling of the text in the manifestos (Netjes and Binnema 2007). Furthermore, sensitivity checks using the manifesto based measure of the EU position of the party yields the same substantive conclusions (see Online Appendix 10).
11. Using more extended model specifications that control for a number of other facts reveals a very similar pattern of results see Online Appendices 7 and 8.
12. This number was computed by adding together the proportion of quasi-sentences mentioning the topic across all parties and dividing it by the total number of manifestos (i.e. parties) in our data.
13. The results are very similar when performing a sensitive check for which we use the untransformed variable and employ tobit regression models pulled across all countries (see Online Appendix 2). Using models with random slopes for the independent variables of interest yields the same substantive conclusions.
14. Disaggregating the EP group variable by including dummy variables for each party group (with the EPP as a reference category) shows that the only statistically significant difference can be noted between the EPP and the parties that do not have a Spitzenkandidat (i.e. ECR + EFD and non-affiliated and non-EP groups). At the same time, no statistically significant difference can be noted between parties that nominated a candidate (see Online Appendix 9).
15. Using a measure of the party stances towards the EU which is based on the difference between positive and negative mentions of quasi-sentences regarding EU constitutive issues as coded by the EES 2014 Euromanifesto Study (Schmitt et al. Citation2016), reveals an identical pattern of results, see Online Appendix 10.
16. In subsequent models, we also controlled for how salient the EU issue is for the party and the degree of intra-party dissent regarding this issue (both measured by the 2015 CHES data). None of these effects reached statistical significance, and adding them to the model did not impact on the substantive effect of the other variables.
17. Including both the party position and the position of supporters in the same model does not change the substantive findings for the salience models, but it renders effects statistically insignificant in the case of the framing model (see Online Appendix 3). Furthermore, it is important to note that the results are similar when computing the position of supporters based either on the 2009 EES Voter Study or the 2012 European Social Survey (see Online Appendix 4).