Wybory do Parlamentu Europejskiego w państwach Grupy Wyszehradzkiej. Weryfikacja modelu second-order election

The ten new Member States joined the European Union on 1 May 2004. Since then three elections to the European Parliament have been held. This paper attempts to answer the question whether the second-order election model (one of the best known theories concerning the voting behavior in Western Europe), created in 1980 by Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt, is the right research tool for the analysis of the EP elections in the new Member States from Central and Eastern Europe. The analysis was conducted on aggregated data for the countries of the Visegrad Group.