di Marcello Carammia e Roderick Pace Introduction On Saturday 24 May the third European election since Malta joined the EU was held. Malta elected six Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), one more than in 2009. The electoral system is the same as the one used in national elections, the major difference being that the 13 electoral districts are merged into one. It is a proportional system based on the Single Transferable Vote (STV), that permits voters to enumerate as many preferences as the candidates listed on the ballot sheet (Katz 1984). The small dimension of districts, the fact that...

Peter Spáč On May 24 the election to European parliament was held in Slovakia. This election was the third since the country`s entry to the EU. As in the previous contests, the turnout was extremely low and in 2014 it reached its historical minimum as only 13 per cent of the Slovak citizens participated on the polls. The elections to EP in Slovakia are held under a proportional electoral system with a single nationwide constituency where all 13 MEPs are elected. Originally Slovakia had 14 MEPs, but after Romania and Bulgaria entered the Union, this number was slightly reduced. In...

Simona Kustec Lipicer EU was almost completely absent from the third Slovenian elections to the European Parliament. In times when official campaign for the EP elections took place domestic political crisis finally erupted in its whole complexity, although even before it no really visible signs of European elections atmosphere could be detected either within political parties, publics and nor even media. At the end election results in a way confirmed a typical second-order character of EP elections in a part that is related to the opposition and new alternative parties’ election success (Reif and Schmitt 1980), although 2014 EP election results...

Michał Kotnarowski and Mikołaj Cześnik Introduction: the context The European Parliamentary (EP) Elections held on 25th May were the third EP elections in modern history of Poland. The first election took place in 2004, just after joining European Union, and the second in 2009. The main characteristics of previous Polish EP elections were low voter turnout and relatively good results of small and radical parties. Voter turnout in 2004 EP elections in Polish case was 21% and it was the second lowest rate among EU countries in 2004 EP elections. The only country with lower voter turnout was Slovakia (17%). The voter...

Sorina Soare Bulgaria, which formerly belonged to the Communist bloc, entered the EU in 2007. Nevertheless, compared to the other countries of the former Warsaw Pact, the Bulgarian process of European integration was carried out with 3 years of delay; as demonstrated by Noucheva and Bechev (2008), the reasons Bulgaria as well as Romania lagged behind in meeting the EU accession criteria had to do with a set of domestic factors linked to a tortuous democratization process, with relevant veto players and institutional structures that obstructed democratic and market reforms for almost a decade. Despite the acceleration of political and...