Mapping citizens, voters, and parties’ preferences on European solidarity across EU member states

ABSTRACT

Since 2008, the European Union (EU) witnessed a growing tension between the social and economic dimensions of integration as a consequence of the ‘polycrisis’. The increasing politicisation of EU issues in national political arenas that led to the rise of Eurosceptic parties mostly revolved around the issue of European solidarity. Against this background, this study investigates the congruence between voters and incumbent members of national parliaments on the highly contentious aspects of EU solidarity. First, the article maps the extent to which national political elites share similar views on EU solidarity with their voters. Secondly, we assess members of parliaments (MPs)-voters’ congruence at the party level. Employing original data from an elite and a mass survey conducted in six EU countries between 2017 and 2018, we find that both voters and MPs expressed a high level of support for policies strengthening European solidarity in the Eurozone periphery. Instead, voters in Northern and Eastern EU member states shared more positive preferences than their national representatives. Furthermore, the party-voter distance was higher for radical-right Eurosceptic MPs, especially in Northern Europe, than for other parties.

KEYWORDS:

• European Union
• European solidarity
• congruence
• representation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2024.2355532.

Notes

1. United Kingdom was also included in the REScEU survey. However, since the surveys were conducted after the outcome of the referendum on UK withdrawal from the EU held in 2016, the British questionnaire does not include most of the items administered in the other six sample countries.

2. Cronbach’s alphas on the five items computed for each country separately are always greater than 0.6 (see Table A2 in the appendix). We rescaled the index to range between 0 and 10 to facilitate the interpretation of results.

3. The correlation between the additive index of EU solidarity and the factor extracted from the factor analysis is of 0.995 for MPs and 0.993 for citizens with a 99% statistical significance.

4. We opted for the median because it is a measure of central tendency less skewed by extreme values compared to the average and more consequential from a strategic point of view based on the median voter theorem. Analyses using the average position in the Appendix do not return differences.

5. As shown in Figure A2 of the Appendix, there is a 0.89 statistically significant correlation between the average Left-Right self-positioning of MPs for each party and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) LRGEN variable.

6. The left-right positioning of parties is based on the 2017 Chapel Hill Expert FLASH Survey (Polk et al. 2017).

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the European Research Council [340534].