First Draft Please Do Not Quote Second-Order Elections to the European Parliament: Is E-Voting the Solution?

Direct elections to the European Parliament were first held in 1979. Although they were con-tested, in most places, by the same parties that also compete in first-order national elections, they were different. Efforts to summarize these differences emphasised a few central points. First and most importantly, European Parliament elections lacked any of the usual dramatic consequences of the electoral process. No government was formed after election day. No head of government – be it a Prime Minister, a Chancellor, or whatever – was depending on the strength of political groups in the newly elected parliament. More important than the European consequences of European Parliament elections were their national implications. Whether or not a national government could be said to be reaffirmed by the election result; whether or not the opposition could draw support from it in its strife for na-tional political power; these were the questions that political actors were dealing with. Conse-quently, European Parliament elections have been described as second-order national elections (cf. Reif and Schmitt, 1980; Reif, 1984, 1985a; Curtice, 1989). As such, they appeared to be simi-lar to mid-term elections in the US; Landtagswahlen in Germany; by-elections in Britain; and so on.1 Specific to this type of second-order national elections is that their immediate, arena-specifi