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...

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...

Sorina Soare Over the past 25 years, Romania has experienced a complex process of democratization with moments of crisis, economic stagnation, radical nationalism and extreme polarization (Bunce and Wolchick 2006, Soare 2011). Despite Romania’s admission into NATO in 2004, and into the European Union in 2007, the political situation remained unstable, with recurrent institutional clashes between the President, Prime Minister and Parliament, such as in 2007 and 2012 (Gherghina and Mişcoiu 2013) and tough austerity measures that fuelled social tensions. Sorina Soare is a lecturer of Comparative Politics. She holds a PhD in political science from the Universitè libre de Bruxelles...

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...

Liisa Talving and Lukas Pukelis Estonia The third European Parliament elections in Estonia were considered a preview of upcoming general elections in spring 2015, above all providing insight to power relations in domestic political scenery. Implementing open party lists as opposed to 2009 enabled the heavy artillery of Estonian politics to go against each other in competing for the title of the most popular politician in the country. Amid the low overall turnout (36.4%), the proportion of e-voters notably increased compared to 2009, reaching to 11.45% of those eligible to vote and to 31% of actual voters (in 2009, 6.5%...