The Lisbon Treaty introduced key institutional changes to increase the relevance of elections to the European Parliament (EP). Among these was the ‘Spitzenkandidaten process’, which was introduced with the aim to increase the visibility of the EP elections and mobilize more citizens to turnout to vote. This article investigates the effect that the debates among the Lead Candidates had on voters’ perceptions about candidates and policy issues. To do this, we administered a two-wave panel online survey to a sample of students from different European universities prior to the Spitzenkandidaten debates and right after them, following the logic of a quasi-experimental research design. Following a difference-in-differences approach, we gauge the extent to which those respondents who were exposed to the debates increased their degree of information about the candidates and changed their perceptions about the candidates and their policy positions. The findings reveal that respondents who followed the debate felt significantly more informed to make up their minds about the candidates as well as to make their vote decisions and slightly improved the perceptions of the policy positions of those candidates who they had intended to vote for.

《里斯本条约》引入了关键的制度变革，以提高选举与欧洲议会 (EP) 的相关性。其中包括“Spitzenkandidaten 进程”，其目的是提高 EP 选举的知名度并动员更多公民投票。本文调查了主要候选人之间的辩论对选民对候选人和政策问题的看法的影响。为此，我们按照准实验研究设计的逻辑，在 Spitzenkandidaten 辩论之前和之后对来自不同欧洲大学的学生样本进行了两波小组在线调查。遵循差异中的差异方法，我们衡量参与辩论的受访者在多大程度上增加了有关候选人的信息，并改变了他们对候选人及其政策立场的看法。调查结果显示，参与辩论的受访者在对候选人下定决心以及做出投票决定时感到更加知情，并且略微改善了对他们打算投票支持的候选人的政策立场的看法。