Voting behaviour in the 2014 European Parliament election

Sammanfattning: The European Parliament election is one of the most extensive elections in the world and affects more than 500 million people within the European Union. Prior research have mainly been using two different frameworks to explain voting behaviour in the European Parliament elections, namely the second-order election theory and the Europe-matters framework. The second-order theory states that national issues play a major role in the voting behaviour and the Europe-matters frameworks basically imply that European issues play a major role in the citizens’ voting behaviour. Prior research has relied too much on aggregate data, has operationalised the frameworks wrongly and has not given equal weight to the frameworks. In this study, I tried to come to terms with these problems and the research question was to test which of the frameworks that best explains the voting behaviour in the European Parliament election of 2014. The results are mixed and no framework seem to explain the voting behaviour better than the other. Nevertheless, other interesting results are possible to find and two of these results are that people tend to cast protest votes against their government if they disapprove it and that EU disapproval affects abstaining from voting more than government disapproval does, in the European Parliament election of 2014.