Campaign spending and electoral systems have a major impact on the outcomes of European Parliament elections

The next European Parliament elections will take place in May 2014. Laura Sudulich writes on the role that campaign spending and electoral systems have on the outcomes of European elections. She finds that, in line with expectations, candidates who spend more on campaigning are more likely to be elected. She notes, however, that the overall advantage is modest and that the electoral system in which candidates operate is essential for explaining how involved they are in campaigning for votes

A longitudinal study of online campaigning in the most digitally advanced society in the world

The internet has become a key battleground for political parties and candidates running for office. Using data from three consecutive parliamentary elections in Estonia, spanning across the last decade, we map the extent to which candidates make use of online campaign tools. The availability of candidate survey data over time enables us to evaluate how online campaigning has evolved in a country at the forefront of digitalisation. Our findings show that, despite a highly wired context, candidates still do not exploit the internet to its full potential. We observe a significant increment in candidates’ presence on the web, but the effort remains limited in terms of the range of digital campaign tools used. In addition, we find that candidates’ political profile has a limited influence on their digital proclivity, while young age and intensity of their overall campaign effort are stable predictors of it across the decade

Internet effects in times of political crisis: online newsgathering and attitudes towards the European Union

This paper evaluates the influence of online news consumption on attitudes towards the European Union in a context of protracted economic crisis. Using data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, we combine location-specific information on broadband availability with respondent geo-location data, which facilitates causal inference about the effects of online news consumption via instrumental variable (IV) models. We find that Irish citizens who source political information online are more prone to blame the EU for the poor state of the economy than those who do not. We find evidence of preference reinforcement among those with negative predispositions towards the EU, but not among pro-EU citizens. We complement this analysis with a study of voting behaviour in the European Fiscal Compact Referendum, employing a similar methodological approach. The results from this second survey confirm the anti-EU influence of online news consumption among Irish citizens, although we find suggestive evidence of a pro-EU effect among voters who browsed the website of the politically neutral Irish Referendum Commission. Our paper contributes to the literature on public opinion, the EU, and political attitudes in times of crisis

Cyber-space oddity? : an analysis of political parties\u27 websites and online campaigning

THESIS 9350This dissertation is an empirical investigation of how the internet is used by political parties and their candidates. This project seeks to make an original contribution to the literature on political parties, electoral campaigns and democratic theory

Lost in transmission : evaluating internet effects on citizens’attitudes towards the European Union in times of crisis

Previous studies suggest that citizens' attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are influenced by media coverage of EU institutions and policies. To date, empirical studies have investigated the effects of TV and newspaper consumption on euro-skepticism. However, the role of the Internet remains under-explored. In this study we combine data on broadband availability with respondent geo-location data from the 2011 Irish National Election Study, which allows us to measure whether respondents live in an area with broadband coverage. We use this dataset to perform a quasi-experimental analysis that identifies the effect of online news-gathering on citizens' evaluations of the extent to which the European Union and the Euro are culpable for the current economic crisis. To allow for heterogeneous treatment effects, we implement local average response functions (LARF) in our analysis. We find that those citizens who source political information online are more prone to blame the EU for (mis)managing the current economic crisis than those who do not

Picking your party online – an investigation of Ireland's first online voting advice application

Online voting advice applications (VAAs), which help voters to decide in elections, have become commonplace in many European countries. However, their use and reliability is under-researched. This paper analyses the data generated by a VAA deployed in the run-up to the May 2007 general election in Ireland. The website was designed to allow users to compare their own placement on a number of policy dimensions with those of the main parties competing in the election. We compare the users of the website to the population in terms of their overall demographic characteristics and policy preferences, and examine the extent to which the advice issued by the website corresponded to users' stated voting intentions. The findings indicate that the VAA attracted users that were not representative of the wider population. Furthermore, we find that the supporters of the two main centre-right parties in Ireland (Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael) were less likely to be correctly identified by the application than supporters of the other parties. While VAAs offer the potential to improve the quality of democratic participation, the findings reported here also highlight a number of important challenges

Determinants of Twitter interactions between candidates in multilevel electoral campaigns

Parties and their candidates increasingly evolve in multi-layered contexts where supranationaland sub-national levels play a big role in the political competition. A growingliterature focuses on the behaviour of parties and candidates in this new institutional context(Deschouwer 2003; Fabre 2008, 2011). Yet, these studies mainly consider how it impactsintra-party processes during elections (e.g. candidate selection), affects individual careerpatterns within parties (Stolz 2003; Dodeigne 2014), or influences voting behaviour (Hough& Jeffery 2006). We take the first step to exploring how parties and candidates interact duringelectoral campaigns in multi-layered contexts. We investigate whether these interactions arestructured horizontally, reflecting a certain degree of autonomy between layers (stratarchy –see Carty 2004; Bolleyer 2012), or if they follow vertical structures across layers, based on ahierarchical partisan logic or other cleavage dimensions (left-right, centre-periphery, etc.).The case of the May 2014 Belgian elections - where parties and candidates competed at theregional, federal, and European levels simultaneously - offers a unique opportunity toinvestigate campaign behaviours in a multi-layered context. We explore interactions betweencandidates on Twitter in the run up to the vote. We define interactions based on the flow ofretweets and conversations (@) initiated by candidates. In so doing we capture dynamicinteractions or networks, as opposed to a more static definition based on followers. Moreoverthe Belgian case enables us to explore whether Twitter based networks go beyond thelanguage divide (French/Flemish). Interactions are analysed using Social Network Analysisand tools like Ucinet (Borgatti, Everett and Freeman, 2002). Ultimately, we seek to unveil anddisentangle whether patterns of vertical or horizontal structure prevail.info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublishe