INFORMATION OCH VALDELTAGANDE En analys av det svenska Europaparlamentsvalet 2019

Abstract

The gap between turnout in national parliamentary elections and European Parliament elections are not particularly large in most EU member states. Sweden, on the other hand, has one of the biggest differences between voting participation in the European Parliament elections and national elections. Previous research has suggested that this may be due to a lack of knowledge about the EU, the European Parliament and/or the European Parliament elections. Several studies have shown that information has a considerable influence on the likelihood to vote and this thesis examines the relationship between information and turnout in European Parliament elections, by examining what type of sender, dissemination method and information that has the greatest connection with turnout. The hypotheses are tested using two types of regression analyses on the European Parliament Election Study 2019. The results show that there is a strong significant positive relationship between voter participation and the consumption of information from political parties and personal conversations with friends and family that the recipient actively seek out or take part in. Moreover, the thesis has not been able to find any correlation between turnout and overall news media consumption or between turnout and Europe/EU specific information from news media consumption.