When Political Interest is not Enough: A quantitative study on what deterred politically interested citizens from voting in the 2019 European Parliamentary election

Abstract: The European Union (EU) has long suffered from a democratic deficit, something that has been highlighted many times by politicians, media and citizens alike. The EU has in turn tried to better its democratic standing by increasing the power of the European Parliament (EP) through the Treaty of Lisbon in 2009. This has however not increased turnout in the EP elections substantially, as only the latest election saw an increase at all with a turnout of about 50%. Voter turnout has in turn been analysed in much research, from rational choice theorists in the 50’s to the socioeconomic works of the 70’s and 90’s, with new EP research in the 00’s. In many of these works political interest is seen as a driving factor behind voter turnout, but in the case of the EU, many politically interested are not voting in EP elections. This Master’s thesis aims to find an answer to this, asking the research question (RQ) as to what deterred some politically interested citizens from voting in the EP election of 2019. By gathering and analysing previous research and theory on voter turnout on the general population, hypotheses are formulated as for why some politically interested people did not vote – mainly Euroscepticism and lack of satisfaction with EU democracy. The RQ and the hypotheses are tested and answered through several multilevel logistic regressions, with the European Election Study of 2019 as material. The study finds that the main reasons as for why politically interested people did not vote in the 2019 EP election was the same as the general population – a lack of “hard” Eurosceptic options and a dissatisfaction with EU democracy. The conclusion is thus that the explanatory models that apply to the general population regarding voter turnout in EP elections stands true for the politically interested as well.