Candidate turnover in EP- versus national elections: a new perspective on the second-order logic? A comparative analysis

ABSTRACT This article investigates the differences between candidate turnover at national legislative and European Parliament elections. Multilevel analysis is applied on original data containing 2754 electoral lists, clustered within 79 political parties, within 48 national and European elections. These comparative data allow (1) to test hypotheses on second-order EU elections within the context of electoral recruitment and (2) to measure the effect of systemic turnover drivers, which in turn may differ for EP elections. As such, this paper builds further on the emerging literature on candidate renewal by offering a comparative perspective and understanding the particular dynamic for EP elections. Results suggest that candidate turnover is lower at EP elections. Moreover, the effects of turnover drivers differ at EP elections: candidate turnover is lower on lists of fringe parties at the European level and elections with higher electoral volatility are characterised by higher candidate turnover, particularly at European elections.