Germany

It is a central (and too often overlooked) problem in comparative research and comparative methodology how to define the time frame of the investigation (see Bartolini 1993; Pierson 2003). Indeed, when conducting macro- comparative research in the sense of comparing nation states, the researcher has to be aware of the fact that one and the same year can have different meanings in different countries. ‘Time’ in this sense is not an only quantitative category, but also a qualitative category. This is also the case when we look at the four European elections which are at stake here. If we take the first election in the 1990s, namely the European election of 1994, this was the last election during the Mitterand era in France, the first after the breakdown of the old party system in Italy, and the first in Germany after re- unification, with the initial enthusiasm already being over. One does not need to refer to the concept of a ‘second order election’ (Reif and Schmitt 1980) in order to understand that this means that the 1994 European elections in France, Italy, and Germany happened in different national contexts. These contexts also had their effect on the various manifestos.