An Electoral Outlier or Second Order Business as Usual? A Decade of European Elections in Romania (2009-2019)
An Electoral Outlier or Second Order Business as Usual? A Decade of European Elections in Romania (2009-2019)

Summary/Abstract: Where the European Union (EU) Member States (MS) are concerned, European elections tend to attract less interest than general elections, despite the fact that, at least until the mid-1990s, the turnout has been over 50% even in the case of these elections. From the 1999 European elections to the ones in 2019, the turnout fell below 50% even though 13 new states have joined the EU after 2004. This is intriguing because in general, in the new MSs, the level of enthusiasm and trust in the EU and its institutions is higher than in the others MSs, especially in the first years after accession. Romania participated in four European elections from 2007 to 2019 and only in one of them the turnout reached 50%. To put things in perspective, for the first two, the turnout was below 30%, in the third one, it slightly exceeded this percentage, while in the fourth one it reached 51%. The European elections have already been theorized as Second Order Elections (SOE), and, at a first glance, the case of Romania does not seem to be an exception from this point of view. This paper aims to analyze the European elections held in Romania following the SOE model, in order to identify those particularities that individualize the Romanian case and are consistent with or reject the SOE model features. The analysis is particularly concerned with the main factors that influenced the turnout and the role that certain political issues of national interest played in increasing the participation during the last elections as well as how they shaped the results registered by several political parties.

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