Das Dilemma der EU-Wahlbeteiligung - Europawahlanalyse 2014

The election of the European parliament ranks among as one of the most important elections of the whole world. The European people, however, might not realize how important it is so that the turnout of this election is by far lower than the turnouts of the national elections of the member states. If we consider the latest election results this master’s thesis sets the focus on the Second Order Election Theory and its validity after the election of the European Parliament in 2014. Furthermore it will be analysed, why the individual European Parliament election turnover rates of the different member states are so much lower from their retro perspective national election. This is remarkable, especially because the data of the Eurobarometer shows that the reputation of the European Union is far above average. The
development of the turnover rates of the national and the European elections have decreased constantly over the last thirty years. However, the difference between the turnout of the European elections and the national elections is on average still above 20 % in favour of the national elections. This leads to a strong bias distortion of the election readiness, which veils the main election intentions of the voters of specific member states. The fact that not all data from the research institutes were available at the time of this study opens a lot of additional research opportunities in the future.