Introduction
Since their introduction in 1979, direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) have been widely regarded as second-order electoral contests (Reif and Schmitt, 1980; Hix and Høyland, 2022; Hix and Cunnigham, forthcoming). Their defining characteristics include low voter turnout; a higher incidence of wasted ballots; stronger electoral performance by small and fringe parties at the expense of governing parties; and the predominance of national over European issues in campaign discourse. The distinctive nature of EP elections raises the question whether electoral participation in these contests follows the same underlying logic as in national, first-order elections. If citizens are more inclined to abstain or vote in an unorthodox way in EP elections, do political and institutional factors—key predictors of national turnout—exert the same effects? Surprisingly, this question has received little attention in the existing literature.
We hypothesise that political and ins...



