Political campaign, government approval and EU elections*

Whether EU elections are best seen by citizens as secondary elections or truly European ones is a matter of scholarly debate. This paper assesses the explanatory power of different interpretative models of voting behavior in the 2009 European elections. We focus, on the one hand, on models linking the European vote to national political concerns ('Second Order' model) and to the domestic electoral cycle ('Midterm' model) and, on the other hand, on interpretations based on the role of the electoral campaign, European issues and attitudes of both parties and voters towards the EU (what we will call the 'Europe Matters' model). We discuss a composite model which tries to implement the salient predictors from each of the former models, so as to provide a more solid account for the dynamic of individual voting behavior in European elections. It is also found that Europe-related factors play a larger role than usually ascertained.