Introduction

For most citizens in Europe, including young people up to the age of 30, voting is the predominant and most effective form of political participation. It is thus a central practice of citizenship. However, the aggregate turnout in European Parliament (EP) elections has repeatedly been low, with only half of citizens using their right to vote. In post-socialist countries that joined the European Union (EU) in 2004 or later, participation is even lower. Here, turnout has consistently been around 20 percentage points below the EU-15 average (see Table 4.1). Moreover, a high vote share for Eurosceptic parties in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has raised concerns (Hobolt and de Vries, 2016; Hloušek and Kaniok 2020a).

In the 2019 EP elections, turnout rose for the first time since 1979, and participation in the post-socialist member states was significantly higher than in any previous election. At the same time, Eurosceptic parties across the continent were able to consolidate their results (Treib 2021), and there is a burgeoning body of research on the regional patterns of turnout and Euroscepticism (Schoene, 2019; Dijkstra et al, 2020).

Against this background, this chapter analyses regional patterns of (non-)participation and Eurosceptic voting in the 2019 EP elections in five post-socialist countries, namely the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Slovakia. These member states were selected because they share similarities in terms of history (including a socialist past outside the Soviet Union), regional location, economic structure, and culture, and because they all experienced democratization, economic liberalization, and EU accession after 1989.