Putting Brexit into perspective: the effect of the Eurozone and migration crises and Brexit on Euroscepticism in European states

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the link between recent EU crises and the development of party-based Euroscepticism across Europe. It draws on data from expert surveys with qualitative data to outline the way in which we can empirically see the link between the impacts of the crises in European states, and how far, and in what ways, Euroscepticism has been mobilized by political parties in those states. It identifies four main frames through which the EU is contested in European states which focus on: economic factors, immigration, democracy/sovereignty and national factors. It also shows that there has been a clear difference between the impacts of the different crises. While the Eurozone crisis had a particularly powerful effect in the party systems of those countries most affected by the bailout packages and the migration crisis had a particularly strong effect on party politics in the post-communist states of central Europe, Brexit has had a very limited impact on national party politics, although this may change in the longer-term.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroscepticism
• political parties
• Eurozone crisis
• migration crisis
• Brexit

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Paul Taggart http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1535-3015

Aleks Szczerbiak http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4389-9557

Notes

1 EPERN was established in 2000 originally as the ‘Opposing Europe Research Network’, a network of scholars researching the comparative party politics of Euroscepticism. It then broadened its intellectual focus out to encompass the domestic politics of European integration and its impact on parties, elections and referendums more generally, with the study of Euroscepticism one (albeit important) strand within that; although in recent years, EPERN's main research focus has returned once again to party Euroscepticism. See: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/sei/research/europeanpartieselectionsreferendumsnetwork.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) ‘UK in a Changing Europe’ programme commissioning grant [PO 4030006666]. All the data produced is included in the published article.