Voting for Hard Eurosceptic Parties in 2024 European Parliament Elections in the Czech Republic: The Role of Salience and Attitude toward Czexit.

In this article, we test the applicability of the EU issue voting model to the case of the 2024 Czech European Parliament elections. Given the increasing importance of the issue of leaving or remaining in the European Union, we examine whether voters’ attitudes towards this issue affect their electoral behaviour. Furthermore, research on individual-level salience’s effects on EU issue voting is limited. To address this gap, we leverage post-election survey data on the importance voters attribute to the issue of leaving the EU to assess whether salience influences turnout and moderates the effect of voter preferences on party choice. We show that voters who judge the issue of Czexit to be highly salient are less likely to abstain. Additionally, we find that in general, voters’ attitudes regarding Czexit exert only a weak effect on their decision to support parties that reflect their views on this issue. However, we find that this effect is moderated to a large degree by the salience that voters attribute to the issue, in that voters considering the question of Czexit to be highly salient are considerably more likely to support parties that match their preferences (i.e. Czexit supporters vote for hard Eurosceptic parties and remain supporters for non-hard Eurosceptic parties). Thus, the study concludes that voter behaviour largely follows an EU issue voting logic, highlighting the key role played by issue salience in this process.