The Impact of Economic Perceptions on Voting Behaviour in European Parliamentary Elections

Abstract: Economic voting is a key explanatory factor for the short-term variation of vote choice, party competition and electoral volatility. This article applies the well-established literature on economic voting to the analysis of European Parliament elections. In theoretical terms, it focuses on a forward-looking selection model and probes the difficulties of signal extraction in the multilevel context of European Union politics. In methodological terms, hierarchical mixed logit models are used so as to explore the magnitude and the determinants of economic voting in the 2004 and the subsequent 2009 EP elections. Although the EU has acquired significant economic policy domains from the Member States, and therewith effectively blurring political responsibility for economic policies, this analysis demonstrates that voters are nevertheless able to extract competence signals and cast an economic vote. The article also focuses on the conditionality of the economic vote and vote abstention in EP elections.