In this interactive exercise, you will work with the European Election Survey 2024 dataset. On the left, three dropdown menus control the plot shown on the right. You first have to select one of four European countries. As soon as you do so, you will see a cross table of voter movements between national and European Parliament elections based on the respondents' vote choice answers in the survey. The table sums up to 100% in the rows, meaning we can see what share of voters that voted for a party in the last national election also voted for that party in the European election in 2024 To give an example: if you select Austria, you will see voters that voted for the SPÖ in the national election in the first row. 54% of them voted for the SPÖ again in the European election, 2% voted for the Green party, 15% did not vote at all.

With the second menu, you can select one of the parties in the country. Finally, you can choose either the evaluation of the government or support for EU integration in the final dropdown menu. After you select both a party and one of the variables, you will see two plots on the right. The first plot shows the distribution of the variable you chose among the voters of the party. The second plot shows how this variable is connected to vote choice, specifically, whether the respondents chose to remain with the party they voted for in the national election. To give an example: we choose Austria and the SPÖ again and select Government_record as the variable. You can see that a majority of SPÖ voters disapproved of the government in 2024 (which makes sense as they were in the opposition). However, there does not seem to be a clear relationship between government record and voting for the SPÖ: Around 50% of SPÖ voters also voted SPÖ in the European election, regardless of government approval.

Using this panel, please answer the following questions:

1. The second order election model states that voters that are unhappy with their national government are likely to punish incumbent parties in European elections. Can you find support for this in the data?

2. We would expect Eurosceptic voters of government parties to be more likely to defect from their national vote choice. Do you find support for that?

3. The voters of which parties are the most likely not to vote in European elections?