Awareness of Spitzenkandidaten in the 2019 European elections: The effects of news exposure in domestic campaign contexts

Abstract

With the introduction of the so-called Spitzenkandidaten procedure, by which European party families nominate lead candidates for the post of President of the European Commission for European elections, the European Parliament (EP) sought to raise voter awareness and engagement by personalizing the campaigns. This article studies candidate recognition with respect to Spitzenkandidaten, which is an important prerequisite in the study of personalization effects on voter behaviour. We use novel survey data collected in 10 European countries in the 2019 EP election campaign (n = 17,027). The article focuses on the role of voters’ news exposure in various media and argues that news exposure is crucial for candidate recognition, but its effect is contingent upon the domestic campaign context. The article is the first to show that the campaign context matters to the extent that news exposure is particularly relevant in those domestic contexts in which Spitzenkandidaten were not previously present. In other campaign contexts additional news exposure adds little to the effect of news exposure on candidate recognition. The results have important implications for understanding EP election campaigns.