ELECTORAL PARTICIPATION AND VOTING BEHAVIOUR IN THE EUROPEAN ELECTIONS. THE BULGARIAN AND ROMANIAN CASES.

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the voting behaviour of the Bulgarians and Romanians in the European elections, in order to identify the similarities and the differences regarding the results, the rate of the electoral participation and the interest for these elections. To that effect, we stress out the disparities between the declared enthusiasm of the population concerning the European elections (and their countries' integration in the European Union in general) and the discouraging voter turnout, at the 2009 and the recent 2014 European elections, in comparison with the European average. We base our working hypothesis on a number of analyses conducted at the European Union level. According to some of those, the EU institutions are most trusted in Malta, Romania, Bulgaria, Estonia and Lithuania. The public from Bulgaria, Estonia, Lithuania, Malta and Romania should tend to be more open-minded than other EU citizens when it comes to accepting decisions that come from the supra-national authority of the European institutions and are more likely to accept the sovereignty transfer from the national to the EU level. However, the lack of information regarding the European Union's institutions and policies translates, in Romania and Bulgaria, in a decrease in the interest regarding the European elections. In addition to that, in Romania, the lack of people's trust in the national political class, but also in the European Union's capacity to offer concrete solutions to the problems of the citizens, determines them to have a sceptic attitude towards their representatives in the European institutions. Hence, we can observe a major gap between the level of enthusiasm of the Romanian and Bulgarian citizens regarding the European integration and their decreased interest regarding the electoral participation in the European elections, that allows us to conclude that the national politics tends to have a bigger influence on the participation rate at the European elections than the type of electoral system or the trust in the European Union and its institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]