Politicizing Europe in times of crisis

ABSTRACT

This paper starts from the premise that the politicization of Europe is indicative of a new structuring conflict that involves a set of processes which put the national political community under strain. This structuring conflict has been emerging long before the Euro and refugee crises. However, these crises may have reinforced and potentially reshaped public conflicts within and across countries. Therefore, the paper traces the politicization of Europe during national election campaigns in fifteen countries from the early 2000s up to 2017. The analysis focuses on the way the multiple crises have affected the level of politicization, its driving forces, and the location of European issues in the political space. Overall, the results indicate a substantive increase in politicization, but they also point to strong region and crisis-specific varieties which should be considered in scholarly discussions on the relative impact of domestic conflicts on the future course of European integration.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicization
• Eurocrisis
• refugee crisis
• radical left
• radical right

Acknowledgments

We have presented earlier versions of the manuscript at workshops in Amsterdam, Berlin, Florence, and Vienna. We would like to thank the participants of these workshops, the guest editors, and the reviewers for their very helpful feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Swen Hutter is Lichtenberg Professor in Political Sociology at Freie Universität and Vice Director of the Center for Civil Society Research, a joint initiative by Freie Universität and WZB Berlin Social Science Center.

Hanspeter Kriesi holds the Stein Rokkan Chair in Comparative Politics at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.

ORCID

Swen Hutter http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1107-1213

Hanspeter Kriesi http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4229-8960

Notes

1 Note that our research period ends in 2017 and does not include the 2018 Italian election campaign.

2 We cross-checked our results by adding Ireland to the NWE countries. The regional results presented in the paper are not affected by this choice.

3 Given the different timing of national elections, our sample includes no cases since the first peak of the refugee crisis in summer 2015 for Hungary, Italy, and Latvia.

4 We do not consider the third dimension of politicization – actor expansion – in our analysis. First, we think that this makes more for sense when studying debates among a wider range of actors (from EU institutions to civil society actors) and for longer periods. By definition, we already observe fairly strong actor expansion if European issues ‘make it’ into an election campaigns. Second, in this paper, we are most interested in the spatial configuration and the capacity of certain issues to structure that configuration. If an issue is not both salient and polarized, it can hardly structure the partisan space.

5 The Swiss parties fought over the bilateral treaties and the Swiss-EU relations more generally in 2003, whereas the German parties were divided on Turkish EU-membership in 2005.

6 Note that the measure has a direction since the distance from the mean position of the other parties may be negative (in the Eurosceptic direction) or positive (in the pro-European direction).

7 We classified the Italian Five Star Movement (M5S) as radical left. As this is a controversial choice, we ran all models excluding M5S which does not change the results substantively.

8 As the robustness check in Appendix C indicates, the substantive effects (and the corresponding confidence intervals) get smaller if we exclude Greece from the analysis. However, the pattern remains the same: The crisis has reinforced the inverted U-curve in SE.

9 The reader should keep in mind that the MDS-method focuses on the main lines of opposition. Secondary issues/actors are less accurately represented and are often moved to the periphery of the space. Issues that account for less than 2 percent of the observations and parties with less than 30 observations were excluded from the analysis (for a detailed description of the procedure, see Appendix B).

10 While immigration was a high salience issue in the Italian campaign in 2018 (which is not covered by our dataset), the other three Southern European countries showed hardly any significant conflicts over immigration in the campaigns around the first peak of the refugee crisis in 2015.

Additional information

Funding

We gratefully acknowledge funding from the H2020 European Research Council (ERC) Project ‘Political Conflict in Europe in the Shadow of the Great Recession’ [Project ID: 338875]. Swen Hutter also gratefully acknowledges funding from the Volkswagen Foundation during the final preparation of this manuscript.