The role of environmental issues in European elections. Assessing whether European elections establish an electoral connection based on these issues

Abstract

This thesis investigates whether European elections establish an electoral connection based on the environment, a relevant EU-policy issue, at three different stages: the electoral campaign, election day, MEPs' vote in the European Parliament plenary. The study covers EU-28 countries participating in the 2014 and 2019 elections. It applies different regression models, and the main variables are computed using candidates' and parties' tweets, data from citizens' surveys, and MEPs' roll-call votes. A dictionary of environmental words is used to compute parties' and candidates' environmental salience based on the tweets posted during the electoral campaigns. First, the study finds that parties are responsive to citizens' environmental concerns during the campaign for the European elections, as higher citizens' environmental concern increases parties' environmental salience during this campaign. Second, parties' environmental salience influences vote choice of citizens who trust the European Parliament. Third, MEPs who had focussed more on the environment during the 2019 European campaign supported a more ambitious emissions' reduction target in the plenary. These results indicate that European elections can establish an electoral connection based on the environment, which suggests that European elections are not simply second order, as EU policy issues can play an important role in them, at least when citizens consider these issues important and are aware of EU's role in the given domain.