European Election Studies (EES) 1989

The Voter Study 1989 is a survey of the electorates of the member states of the European Community. It focuses on the third direct elections of the European Parliament, which were conducted in June 1989. The study consists of three surveys, The first two waves in interviews took place before the European elections in October-November 1988 and March-April 1989. The third was conducted immediately following the European Elections, in June 1989. The number of interviews in the different countries was in each of the three waves approximately 1,000. For Luxembourg, this number was lower, approximately 300. Sample size in the United Kingdom was approximately 1,300, of which approximately 300 interviews were conducted in Northern Ireland. The total number of interviews conducted for the three waves amounts to almost 35,000.

The questionnaires of the study were identical in various member states, apart from minor but unavoidable difference generated by differences in party names and country specific institutions. The three interviews are partially overlapping in contents. Many of the questions have been included in two, some in all three of the interviews, thus offering opportunities for longitudinal comparison of voting behavior and voter orientations. The three waves of interviews constitute a repeated cross-section study, that is, they have been conducted on three independently drawn random samples of the population of the member states of the European Community.

The selection of topics and questions includes: electoral behavior including questions on party choices, past voting behavior, voting behavior at the national level, party preferences, and propensity to support particular parties; general political attitudes and behavior based on a question of interest in politics, campaign, most important problems, attitudes regarding EU, left-right self-placement, placement of parties; background characteristics including gender, age, education, religion, media consumption.

The Voter Study 1989 was funded by a grant from the British Economic and Social Research Council, and an additional grant from the Office of the French Prime Minister. A European consortium of a dozen newspapers also added to the funding of the pre-electoral wave of surveys. Other costs of  the project were covered by Dutch National Science Foundation, the University of Amsterdam, the University of Mannheim, Steinmetz Archive.

For the European Election Study (EES) Trend File covering the voter studies from 1989 to 2004 see also the website of Michael Marsh and Slava Mikhaylov at Trinity College Dublin.

• Data and Documents: Voter Study 1989, Questionnaires (wave 1, wave 2, wave 3)

• Please see here.

• van der Eijk, Cees and Franklin, Mark N., eds. (1996) "Choosing Europe? The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union”. University of Michigan Press.
• Schmitt, Hermann and Mannheimer, Renato (1991) European Journal of Political Research. Special Issue 19(1).