Candidate quality across different orders of elections : the cases of the Czech Republic and Slovakia
Abstrakt
Elections to the European Parliament fall within the category of second-order elections (SOEs). Because these types of elections do not lead to the formation of government, there is less at stake and, consequently, voters behave differently when casting votes.
But do also political parties also behave as if there is less at stake as voters do? This article draws on an original dataset on the political experience of party candidates in the Czech Republic and Slovakia to explicitly link the SOE model to independent actions of political parties. The results show that political parties indeed nominate higher quality candidates to the first-order arena, where more is at stake.
Moreover, parties in government in first-order arena react to domestic situation and nominate lower quality candidates to EP elections than parties in opposition.