Abstract:  Though many Europeans change party choice between national and European Parliament elections, the representational logic underlying this behaviour remains poorly understood. While second-order election theory attributes cross-arena volatility to institutional asymmetries, it cannot explain why switching follows systematic ideological and EU issue-based patterns, or why it increasingly favours Eurosceptic parties. We argue that cross-arena vote switching operates as a mechanism of representational adjustment in multilevel polities. When parties politicize Europe, they make latent disagreements between citizens and their national parties visible, enabling voters to recalibrate representation across electoral arenas. Using harmonized data from the 2024 European Election Study and Chapel Hill Expert Survey covering 25 democracies, we identify three key findings: First, left–right incongruence remains the dominant driver of switching overall, confirming core second-order predictions. Second, EU incongruence becomes influential when parties emphasize Europe in their agendas. Third, this conditional EU effect systematically benefits Eurosceptic parties: when Europe becomes salient, EU-incongruent voters defect toward anti-integration alternatives. These findings reveal that European elections have become arenas of representational choice where citizens strategically adjust alignment across levels of governance and issue dimensions. Vote switching is a corrective response to party–voter incongruence, activated when politicisation makes this mismatch salient with significant implications for democratic legitimacy and the future of European integration.

Keywords:  European Parliament elections; Euroscepticism; issue salience; multilevel representation; party competition; politicisation; representational alignment; second‐order elections; vote switching

Published:   19 February 2026

Issue:   Vol 14 (2026): Consensus About the European Union? Understanding the Views of Citizens and Political Parties