The master’s thesis discusses the connection between the turnout of voters and the voters’ awareness. The latter is one of the numerous factors which can influence whether the voter will participate in the elections or not. I was ascertaining the connection with the case study in two points of time: I compared the institutional campaign of the European Parliament before European elections in 2014 and the This Time I’m Voting institutional campaign of the European Parliament before the European elections in 2019 on the case of Slovenia. A decline in the average of the turnout of voters is characteristic of the elections in the European Parliament. Since the first elections in 1979, the turnout of voters has reduced in the member states of the European Union from 61.9% to 42.6% in 2014 when it was the lowest. The decline in the average of the turnout of voters was stopped in 2019 and raised it to 50.6%. In Slovenia, 28.9% of eligible voters participated in the European elections in 2019 which is 4.4 percentage points more in comparison to the European elections in 2014 and the most since the joining to the EU at the same time. I ascertained that the raise of the turnout of voters can be attributed also to communication campaign of the European Parliament Liaison Office in Ljubljana, which was determined in the comparison with the previous ones for the first time clearly, above all the groups of addressing the voters and the message of the campaign. They also organized essentially more activities for the voters and cooperated intensively with different media. However, I could not confirm the main hypothesis of the master’s thesis that a bigger scope of activities means bigger voters’ awareness and, consequently, a higher turnout of voters. Namely, the turnout of voters depends on many exceptionally complex and intertwined factors.
|