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Abstract
Do parties respond to voters’ preferences on European integration in elections to the European Parliament (EP)? Following recent research that shows political party responsiveness to Eurosceptic attitudes during EP elections is conditioned by party characteristics, this article seeks to understand how party unity on European integration affects party responsiveness to Euroscepticism. It argues that when Eurosceptic attitudes among voters are high and the parties are divided in their position on European integration, parties will be more responsive to voters and take a more Eurosceptic position. To test the theoretical expectations, the study uses data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Euromanifestos Project, and European Election Study for 1989–2009 for over 120 parties across 20 European Union member states. The findings have important implications for understanding the nature of democratic representation in the European Union.
Acknowledgements
We thank the anonymous WEP reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. All errors remain our own.
Notes
1. Importantly, as this study builds on Williams and Spoon’s (Citation2015) findings, we test a similar baseline hypothesis.
2. While it would be interesting to examine party responsiveness to Euroscepticism among party supporters versus the mass public, this analysis is precluded by data restrictions. There are not enough survey respondents for each party to determine an accurate measure of Euroscepticism among party supporters. This is particularly problematic for smaller parties. Further, it is also important to note that other studies have found that parties do not respond differently to voters and party supporters (see e.g. Green Citation2011; Klüver and Spoon Citation2016; Williams and Spoon Citation2015).
3. There are certainly exceptions to this trend. The British Conservatives’ support for the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union is one such example.
4. Note that although it is difficult to measure the attitudes of party supporters regarding the issue of European integration using public opinion data (see note 2), measuring party division allows us to identify a split between party leaders and party supporters.
5. We recognise that the relationship between public opinion, intra-party division, and party position may be iterative. While these are certainly interesting relationships, examining them is beyond the scope of this study. Future research should look at how parties’ positions influence public opinion and intra-party divisions.
6. According to the Euromanifestos coordinators, ‘a “quasi-sentence” is a set of words containing one and only one political idea’ (EES Citation2009: 20). Importantly, there are some dimensions, such as per501, which focuses on environmental protection, that are only positive.
7. The countries included in our analysis are: Austria, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.
8. We rescaled the EU position variable using the following equation: (Difference in Positive and Negative Comments) + 100)/20.
9. Combining the RMS and CHES datasets has been used by other scholars, most notably by Edwards (Citation2007, 2009).
10. We follow other research that has measured Euroscepticism in this manner (see e.g. Williams and Spoon Citation2015). In calculating the aggregate level of Euroscepticism in a state, those who answered ‘Don’t Know’ were removed from the sample.
11. We recognise that five years is a considerable time lag and that parties may be responding to voters’ more recent preferences. But, as there is variation in the timing of when parties craft their manifestos before an election, it is not clear how much of a lag is appropriate (see Hobolt and Klemmensen Citation2008). Thus, for consistency across parties and countries, we use the previous EES to measure voter Euroscepticism. As a robustness check, we also ran the models with concurrent Euroscepticism and the interaction term was only significant when the sample was restricted to non-niche, communist, or right-wing parties.
12. Following Preston and Colman (Citation2000), rescaling was done using the equation (original variable ‒1)/(number of response categories ‒1)*10.
13. As the first election of MEPs in Sweden, Austria, and Finland occurred in 1995 and 1996, respectively, the 1992 RMS expert survey was matched with the 1995 party manifestos in Sweden and the 1996 RMS expert survey was matched with the 1996 party manifestos in Austria and Finland.
14. The parties we code as Eurosceptic are the following: the United Kingdom Independence Party, the Swedish Junilistan, the Danish JuniBevægelsen and Folkebevægelsen mod EU parties, and the Austrian Liste Dr. Hans-Peter Martin.
15. To operationalise a party’s position on the left–right spectrum, we used data from the Euromanifestos Project. This data provides a left–right score (RILE) for each party in the dataset. RILE scores range from ‒100 to +100 with ‒100 being the most left. We rescaled these data to a 0 to 10 scale using the equation ((RILE) + 100)/20. As a robustness check, we also re-ran our analysis using the CHES left–right measure. The results for both our main variables of interest and for the left–right variable remain unchanged.
16. The correlation between the RILE score and the far-right party variable is only 0.18.
17. Data from the 1988 and 1992 (1996 in the case of Austria) RMS surveys and the 1999, 2002, and 2006 CHES surveys were used to develop this measure. The response scale for the question of EU integration salience differed across these surveys and therefore was rescaled using the same formula used to rescale the party division variable.
18. It is also important to keep in mind that as party division on the issue of European integration is, by definition, a split in the party on this issue, it is logical to expect the party to take a rather centrist stance on European integration, and therefore be neither overly supportive of the EU nor overly opposed to the EU.
19. We identified niche and communist parties using the party family coding from the Euromanifestos Project data. A party is considered a niche party or communist party if it was coded as a green party, (post)communist party, nationalist party, regional party, or special interest party in the EMP data (see Adams et al. Citation2006). As Eurosceptic and far-right parties are considered niche parties, they are also removed from the analysis, and therefore the dummy variables denoting whether a party is Eurosceptic or far-right are not included in the analysis.
20. As an additional robustness check, we follow Greene (Citation2016; see also Hellwig Citation2012; Vavreck Citation2009; Williams et al. Citation2016) and include an additional interaction term between GDP/capita and party incumbency in Models 2 and 3. Our results remain unchanged. Further, the interaction between GDP/capita and party incumbency status is statistically insignificant in both models.
21. Following the suggestion of Berry et al. (Citation2012), we graphed the effect of party division on party Euroscepticism as public Euroscepticism varies (x-axis). This is displayed in Figure A1. As can be seen, there is a negative effect of level of party division on party position regarding the EU; however, with the exception of the rare event when public Euroscepticism is 0, the marginal effect of the level of party division on party EU position cannot be differentiated from 0. This supports our hypothesis that increased party division amplifies the effect of public Euroscepticism. However, increasing public Euroscepticism does not amplify the effect of party division.
22. We recognise that Cameron’s decision was perhaps equally influenced by increasing support for UKIP (UK Independence Party) and concern over losing voters over this issue.
