Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament

ABSTRACT

The strengthening of the populist radical right poses an important challenge for European integration. This article explores whether democratic backsliding among member states has acted as a catalyst for broader PRR cooperation at the EU level. Studying the co-sponsorship and contents of parliamentary questions and roll-call vote cohesion of PRR representatives in the European Parliament from 2009 to 2019, we examine the extent and substance of their joint polity-based contestation of European integration. Our findings indicate that overall levels of PRR cooperation remain low and concentrated within European party groups, suggesting that ideological divergences between PRR actors and their institutional fragmentation within the EP still hamper their formal cooperation at the European level. These insights feed into debates on the potential and limitations of transnational cooperation of PRR actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Democratic backsliding
• European integration
• European Parliament
• populist radical right

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Caterina Froio, Emiliano Grossman, Seán Hanley, Mila Mikalayeva, Jan Rovny, Olivier Rozenberg, Frank Schimmelfennig, Matthias Thiemann and three anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. We thank Louise Seyfried for her research assistance.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 MEPs’ voting behaviour on democratic backsliding resolutions has received more attention recently, but the focus has been either a small number of votes (Meijers & van der Veer, 2019a) or a single EPG (Herman et al., 2021).

Additional information

Funding

Mihail Chiru's work was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2021-233, within PNCDI III. Natasha Wunsch gratefully acknowledges support from the OxPo programme for a research stay at Nuffield College.

Notes on contributors

Mihail Chiru

Mihail Chiru is Departmental Lecturer at the University of Oxford.

Natasha Wunsch

Natasha Wunsch is Assistant Professor at Sciences Po and Senior Researcher at ETH Zurich.