This time it's different … but not really! The 2014 European Parliament elections in Ireland

ABSTRACT

This report provides a review of the 2014 European Parliament (EP) elections in Ireland. Conventional wisdom suggests attitudes to the incumbent government or to the candidates on offer have shaped EP elections in Ireland, with sentiments about the EU having little potency. 2014 had the potential to be different: the EU had been especially prominent in Ireland over the past four years since the 2010 EU–IMF (International Monetary Fund) bailout. The introduction of spitzenkandidaten (The President of the Commission had previously been chosen by a consensus of European leaders in the European Council, followed by approval from the EP. But under the Lisbon Treaty, the European Council must take into account the results of the EP elections when selecting the Commission President which gave the EP the power to influence the next Commission President, also gave credence to the idea that the 2014 elections might involve a stronger European dimension. Using data from media sources, an exit poll, and the 2014 European Election Study, our objective is to establish how the campaign evolved and what influenced the 2014 result in Ireland. We find the 2014 European elections for the most part were ‘second-order’, with vote choice mainly influenced by attitudes to the Fine-Gael/Labour coalition. Candidate personality also mattered. However, EU issues gained little traction in the campaign and opinions on the EU had minimal impact on party choice. Our results show that domestic politics remain key to understanding EP elections in Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament
• second order
• elections
• candidates
• attitudes to EU

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Theresa Reidy, Deirdre Tinney, and the comments of two anonymous reviewers for their helpful insights and suggestions. All remaining errors are our responsibility.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The EES is a post-election study administered in all member states exploring voter behaviour in EP elections. The fieldwork for the Irish study was carried out by Behaviour and Attitudes between 30 May and 22 June 2014. A total of 1,081 respondents were interviewed.

2 The exit poll was carried out by Behaviour and Attitudes for RTÉ among a sample of 3,081 voters nationwide interviewed immediately after they had voted on Friday, 23 May 2014. The margin of error is estimated to be ±1.7 per cent at national level and ±3.4 per cent at constituency level.

3 We took support for the coalition as our dependent variable as the ‘second-order’ theory posits that it is attitudes to the government as a whole that matters. Additionally, there were a low number of observations for the Labour Party. For robustness, we re-estimated the model with Fine Gael acting as the reference category. We identified no substantive deviations, with the alternative model in line with our findings.

4 For robustness, we also tested the potential impact of other attitudes towards the EU, namely whether respondents believed Ireland's membership of the EU was a good thing or not and whether they were satisfied or dissatisfied with EU actions over the previous 12 months. We identified no substantive deviations, with the alternative models in line with our findings.

5 The exit poll measure was based on the question: ‘Please tell me which one of the following was the main reason you decided to give your first preference vote to that candidate in the European Parliament elections?’ Potential answers: Personality/Qualities; Party; Policies; Party Leader.

The European Election Study measure was based on the question: ‘please tell me to what extent it corresponds or not to your attitude or opinion: It is very important for you which particular candidates have been elected as MEPs in the European Parliament’. Potential answers: Yes, definitely; Yes, to some extent; No, not really; No, not at all.