In a June 2004 survey of the Public Opinion Research Centre, the respondents were asked to say how often over the last four weeks before the election to the European Parliament they had paid attention to the activities described in table 1. Roughly a half of the polled citizens said that they had ‘sometimes’ watched the information about the European election on TV, read about it in newspapers and discussed it with friends or family.
A third of respondents had paid no attention to the election during the above period. Television programmes about the election were often watched by 13% of those polled, while 16% of respondents often read about it in newspapers and 10% frequently discussed the election with friends or family. The vast majority of respondents (approximately 90% in both instances) never participated in election meetings and never obtained election information through the Internet during the above period.
