Introduction
Since the first direct election of the European Parliament (EP) in 1979, throughout the
most recent election in 2004, Europe-wide turnout rates have increasingly been talked about in
terms of a puzzle, consisting of three main components (Blondel et al. 1998, Franklin 2004).
First, as displayed in Figure 1, despite significant increases in the legislative power of the
European Parliament over time, making the elections considerably more salient, voter turnout
has continuously declined in every consecutive election.
Second, turnout in EP-elections varies
immensely among member states, ranging from 24% in the United Kingdom in 1999 to 92.2% in
Belgium in 1984.
Finally, turnout in EP-elections and turnout in national parliamentary
elections vary immensely within member states, with the average EP-turnout being more than 20
percentage points lower than the average turnout of corresponding prior national parliamentary
elections. The three aspects of the puzzle evoke a number of questions, and the ones that this
paper will focus on are the following: What factors are associated with voter turnout in elections
to the European Parliament among European Union (EU) member states and how has the
relationship of these factors to voter turnout changed over time?
[Figure 1 about here]
Three factors that may be associated with variation in EP-turnout across member states,
and over time are of particular interest in this paper. First, addressing one of the most visible
problems of democratic legitimacy in the EU in general is the existence of a severe
disproportionality in the allocation of seats in the European Parliament and in the allocation of
votes in the European Council, resulting in the population of some countries being numerically
underrepresented while others are overrepresented (Boyce 1993, Weiler et al. 1995). Given that
1
The major steps increasing the political power of the European Parliament occurred with the introduction of the co-
decision procedure through the Single European Act in 1986 and with the extension of the same procedure through
the Treaty on European Union in 1992, the Amsterdam treaty in 1997, and the Treaty of Nice in 2001 (Europa
2005).
2
If turnout in the ten new member states were included in this analysis, Slovakia would have the lowest recorded
turnout with 16.96% in 2004. All EP-turnout rates are displayed in Table 4 in the appendix.
1
Convention