Policy or Polity? Experimental Evidence on Voters' Information Preferences in European Parliament Elections

There is growing evidence that elections for the European Parliament have taken on first order characteristics with many voters using their preferences on EU-specific issues to decide who to vote for. What remains less understood is how these voters navigate the challenging information environment in EP elections: Do they prioritize information about policy issues where the European Parliament has major decision-making power, or do they care more about polity issues that pertain to the union at large, such as the extent of EU integration? We address this question using field experimental data from a Voting Advice Application that we implemented on a major media news site in Denmark during the 2024 EP election campaign. Users were given the option to choose whether they wanted voting advice based on specific policy issues relevant to the European Parliament, or on broader polity issues related to the union as a whole. Using data from more than 66,000 responses, along with additional data from a survey experiment with a representative sample (n = 2,951), we find that citizens favor policy over polity information, and that they use this information to update their vote intention. This indicates a well-functioning electoral connection between voters and policy-makers in the European Parliament.