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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
FOR MANY YEARS PUBLIC OPINION SURVEYS HAVE INDICATED that the peoples of the European Community nations support the principle that various functions now handled at the national level should be handled by European Community institutions. Opponents of supranational political integration have pointed out quite correctly that representative democracy is not based on public opinion polls and that the democratically elected representatives of the people can and should decide such questions.
In June 1979 a European Parliament was elected by the direct vote of the citizens of the nine member–countries of the European Community. For the first time in history, a body exists that was democratically elected by the people of the European Community nations rather than simply being appointed by the respective national parliaments. Though direct election of the European Parliament does not automatically bring increased powers to that institution, it clearly has enhanced the legitimacy of its claim to represent the people of the European Community. The candidates for the Euro ean Parliament represented all significant political parties an1 all shades of political opinion, ranging from the most convinced partisans of supranational political integration to the most ardent defenders of national sovereignty. The voters have chosen among them: what is the result?
1 Fieldwork for this research was supported by the Volkswagenwerk Stiftung, the Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament. We take this opportunity to express our thanks. We also wish to thank the candidates to the European Parliament for their gracious cooperation in these interviews, despite the pressures of the ongoing electoral campaign. This project is part of a broader set of studies of the European elections coordinated by Rudolf Wildenmann, Paolo Farneti, Dusan Sidjanski and Henry Valen. The interviews were carried out by the following organizations and individuals: Germany ‐ Zentrum für Umfragen, Methoden und Analysen (ZUMA); Great Britain ‐ Market Opinion Research (MORI); Italy ‐ Istituto per le Ricerche Statistiche e l’Analisi dell Opinione Pubblica (DOXA); The Netherlands ‐ Nederlands Stichting voor de Statistiek; Ireland ‐ Irish Marketing Surveys; Belgium ‐ DIMARSO/INRA; France ‐ a group led by Patrice Manigand and Dominique Rémy of the Centre d’Etudes de la Vie politique française; Denmark ‐ a group from the University of Aarthus, directed by Carsten Lehman Sorensen; Luxembourg, all interviews were conducted by Mario Hirsch. Cross‐national coordination of the fieldwork was carried out by Karlheinz Reif. For additional findings see Ronald Inglehart, Jacques‐René Rabier, Ian Gordon and Carsten Lehman Sorensen, ‘Broader Powers for the European Parliament? The Attitudes of Candidates’, European Journal of Political Research, 8, 1980.
2 Approximately 3,400 candidates ran for seats in the European Parliament. Available resources did not permit us to interview all of these candidates, so we adopted a sampling procedure designed to obtain interviews with a large share of those most likely to be elected; and to ensure that all significant political tendancies were represented in our sample, even if they were unlikely to win seats. In order to attain these two goals, we first estimated the number of seats each party was likely to win, on the basis of the share of the vote won in the most recent national election. In the eight countries having party lists and some form of proportional representation, we drew our sample from the top of the party lists, working downwards in proportion to the number of seats the party was expected to win, with the target of obtaining about twice as many interviews as the number of seats expected to be won. In the remaining country, Great Britain, our samples were based on performance in the last election, deliberately ignoring the first‐past‐the‐post system. Despite the fact that the Liberals (in particular) seemed unlikely to win any seats in Britain, they represent a significant segment of the British electorate that will be of interest in future analyses. In all nine countries we also set the goal of obtaining at least one interview with candidates from each party expected to win at least one per cent of the national vote, regardless of whether or not they were likely to win any seats.
