The European Parliament relentlessly tries to inform citizens about the reasons for voting in the upcoming elections. As on the previous occasion, the EP this time around is running an information campaign to reach citizens and hopefully thereby increase turnout. Similar tasks are fulfilled by many NGOs, which in different countries organize information campaigns regarding the EP and the elections.

What is still missing, however, among other things, is a reliable set of information regarding party programmes. In an idealized version of the democratic electoral process (often referred to in political science as the ‘responsible party government model’), voters make an informed choice between the competing parties both on the basis of their programmes and on their government or opposition record. Most observers doubt that this is the case nowadays, both in relation to national and European elections.

Voters simply do not read parties’ programmes, and instead rely on other sources to make their judgment about which parties to vote for, such as the media. In the European Parliament elections, this problem is further exacerbated by the fact confirmed by many opinion polls, namely that the EU citizens are not fully aware of the nature of the EP elections, let alone their lack of knowledge about party programmes. So what can be done to get voters interested in these elections?

One way of doing this is through developing Internet-based voting aid applications, which aim both at informing the citizens about party programmes on various issues, but which also are able to show which political party is closest to a given voter. This task is an ambition of the revolutionary voting aid application created for the European Parliament elections – EU Profiler (www.euprofiler.eu), launched on 23 April. Read the rest of this entry »

Many political scientists have long been arguing that the lack of connection between the results of the elections and the subsequent composition of the European Commission has been one of the key obstacles to the emergence of a pan-European political debate, and ultimately, for increased voters’ attention. From the point of view of the Euro-parties, it has led to the effect that so far they have not shaped their campaigns around their approval or criticism of the previous Commission (as would be the case nationally with the governing and opposition parties), but instead have focused on their ideas and solutions for the EU without much reference to the previous commission’s record. Most Euro-parties were further complaining that their electoral role and a real partisan, pan-European campaign, cannot be fully developed until the introduction of a common, pan-European constituency. In other words, without changes within the EU’s institutional environment, not much change was predicted.

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Eurothinkers is  the blog of the Centre for European Studies, the official think-tank of the EPP.   

Currently citizens are engaging in alternate methods of participation in politics. Protest votes, citizen abstention and the increase of voter distrust towards politics mark this phenomenon.

The Centre for European Studies aspires to be  a vital tool in connecting citizens with the policy makers, this blog being a perfect example.

These trends proliferate from the disaffection which citizens feel towards the traditional forms of political participation.  Social mobilization has thus become a day-to-day phenomenon in the media and politics. Do these changes translate into a growing disinterest of the citizens towards politics? Rather do they not reveal a certain disenchantment with the current organisation of representative democracy? In this campaign, Europeans must be informed through numerous modes of communication, of the policy issues being tackled on European level particularly in terms of the concrete solutions and concrete achievements Europe can offer.   Read the rest of this entry »