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...

Enrique Hernández and Marta Fraile Once more, and as is typical in Spain (see for instance Font and Torcal 2012) the main messages and discourses of the electoral campaign were made in national (and not in European) terms. Elections took place when the incumbent government (Partido Popular, PP: conservative) was in the middle of its mandate and had already implemented a number of controversial political decisions. On the top of that, there was a general climate of distrust and disaffection with political elites and traditional political parties without precedents in Spain. The Electoral Campaign The most relevant topic of the campaign (and...

Konstantinos Athanasiadis The elections of the 25th May in Greece were realised amidst pronounced polarisation, deep fragmentation and collapse of partisan identities. Interestingly, the elections coincided with the 40th anniversary of the collapse of the military junta that ruled Greece for seven years (1967-1974) and the subsequent consolidation of democracy as inculcated in the era of Metapolitefsi (change of regime/ new ethos in the conduct of politics). Konstantinos Athanasiadis is PhD Candidate at LUISS Guido Carli University. Mr Athanasiadis earned an MSc in International Politics from SOAS, University of London and a BA in International and European Studies from the University...

Laura Sudulich On Thursday the 22nd of May citizens in the Netherlands and the UK voted to elect national delegates to the next European Parliament. Irish citizens voted on the following day, Friday the 23rd. In the UK the electoral system in use is a closed list system with regional districts. In the Netherlands the system is ordered (belonging to the group of open list systems) and there is one constituency for the whole country to choose the 26 MEPs (one more than in 2009). Irish voters elected their 11 MEPs (one less than in 2009) through PR-STV, a proportional...