Political parties increasingly operate at multiple political levels. Nevertheless, we do not yet know much about the consequences of these multilevel electoral systems (MLESs) on party behaviour. To fill this gap, we examine party manifestos for European Parliament (EP) elections and compare them with party manifestos for national elections. Using manifesto data and covering 15 European Union (EU) countries between 1979 and 2014, we focus on European issues and ask whether parties’ issue emphasis and the positions they take are the same in both kinds of documents and respectively at both levels of the MLES. We show that although parties put more emphasis on EU issues in EP than in national elections, they behave sincerely regarding their position towards the EU – these are very similar irrespective of the electoral context. As many elections take place in MLES environments, in Europe, in particular, but far beyond, this noteworthy finding is highly relevant for scholars of party competition in general and even more instructive for the so far fragmented literature exploring the implications of MLESs.
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