Second order electoral rules and national party systems: The Duvergerian effects of European Parliament elections

Explaining support for the UK Independence Party at the 2009 European Parliament elections

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) achieved its best result in the 2009 European elections, beating the governing Labour Party into second place. Despite its recent success we still know relatively little about who votes for the party and how these supporters compare with those of UKIP’s competitors. This paper analyses support for UKIP at the 2009 European elections first at the aggregate level,...

Strategic Non-Voting in European Parliament Elections

Weather conditions and political party vote share in Dutch national parliament elections, 1971–2010

Inclement weather on election day is widely seen to benefit certain political parties at the expense of others. Empirical evidence for this weather-vote share hypothesis is sparse however. We examine the effects of rainfall and temperature on share of the votes of eight political parties that participated in 13 national parliament elections, held in the Netherlands from 1971 to 2010. This paper...

The Mediatization of Second-Order Elections and Party Launches: UK Television News Reporting of the 2014 European Union Campaign

Using the United Kingdom as a case study to explore the degree to which news about a second-order election is mediatized, this comparative content analysis examines television news coverage of the 2014 European Union elections. Evidence of mediatization was stronger on the most commercially driven bulletins, with an overwhelming emphasis on the game frame and a more interpretive approach than t...

Predicting Party Affiliations from European Parliament Debates

This paper documents an ongoing effort to assess whether party group affiliation of participants in European Parliament debates can be automatically predicted on the basis of the content of their speeches, using a support vector machine multi-class model. The work represents a joint effort between researchers within Political Science and Language Technology.