17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Katjana Gattermann
Discussant/s:
Gerald Schneider
Meeting Room I

Jan Vogler
How Do European Citizens Form Their Views of the EU Public Administration? Exploring the Role of Heuristics

Katjana Gattermann
Polity, politics or policies? Voters’ political news preferences during European Parliament election campaigns

Anastasia Ershova, Aleksandra Khokhlova, Nikoleta Yordanova
Constraining the agency to please the public: the new mode of responsiveness in the EU.

Adriana Bunea, Joe Chrisp
Participation or information? The who, what and why of the EU’s new ‘ubiquitous’ consultation regime
Polity, politics or policies? Voters’ political news preferences during European Parliament election campaigns
Katjana Gattermann
University of Amsterdam

European Parliament elections are considered second-order elections, not least because participation and voting behaviour is often based on evaluations of the European Union (EU) polity, and seldom influenced by policy considerations. Prior research links these considerations to the availability of information during EU elections. This paper takes a step back and asks about what kind of information European voters prefer prior to Election Day. To investigate this, the paper conducts a secondary analysis of experimental data that were collected among 1,191 German respondents at the height of 2019 European Parliament election campaigns. The initial purpose of this survey was to study news preferences with respect to the personalization of politics. The study was pre-registered as such, which is why the present paper only engages in exploratory research. The survey was set up as a conjoint experiment, in which respondents were randomly exposed to several binary choice-sets of headlines featuring either the polity, politics, or policies. In addition, the headlines also varied in terms of subject (politicians/ parties/ institutions) and focus (national/ EU-level/ other European actors). The results suggest that news about politics was least preferred by respondents, while there were hardly any differences concerning the polity or policies. Yet, some respondent characteristics, including EU attitudes, left-right positions, political knowledge, and media trust, also influence preferences. The results are discussed with respect to their implications for scholarly debates concerning the role of information for political behaviour in EU politics.