Secondary choice thesis

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The thesis on secondary elections comes from political science and deals with the formal and assessed significance of the elections of the European Parliament . She justifies the low turnout in the European elections with the fact that the legitimation of the European Parliament is less important than in other elections. As a result, they regard the voters as subordinate and use their voting rights less often.

The election to the European Parliament is considered a “second-order election”, usually translated into German with a by-election. Because the election at the level of the European Union serves to determine the composition of the representative body . In contrast to the general election , for example , the strength of the parties is not decisive for the executive level: The members of the European Parliament are not authorized to form a government or to appoint a president, chancellor or prime minister.

The powers of the European Parliament are also limited. Other bodies have greater political power, most notably the European Commission . It can be deduced from this that the parties are less involved in the election campaign and that the media report more cautiously. In this context, the interest of the population in the election of the European Parliament is hardly promoted. As a result, the electorate is in many ways negative or indifferent to parliamentary representation. The turnout is low.

With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty with the 2014 European elections, the European Parliament's powers were strengthened. The mandate holders legitimized by direct democracy have the right to confirm the commission president. With this democratization a central argument of the secondary election thesis is invalidated. Despite the new regulation, the participation rate has hardly increased, as can be seen from the election results for the 2014 European elections .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Karlheinz Reif, Hermann Schmitt: Nine second-order national elections - a conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results . European Journal of Political Research, 1980, pp. 3-44 .
  2. ↑ Christina Holtz-Bacha: Interest and attitudes of the population Dossier European elections . Federal Agency for Civic Education , 2014.
  3. ↑ Information Office of the European Parliament in Berlin and Munich: Europe 2014 . Consorzio Euredit, Modugno 2014, p. 14 .