Drifting Further Apart: National Parties and their Electorates on the EU Dimension

Abstract

Whether parties are representative of their voters over the EU is a key concern in modern European governance. Using European Election Studies data, this article compares opinion congruence between parties and their electorates on the EU dimension in 2004 and 2009 and examines, at the levels of both member states and individual parties, which factors explain variation in opinion congruence between parties and their supporters over integration. The article shows that parties have become less representative of their voters and that they adopt more convergent positions on the EU dimension than their voters. Congruence is higher in smaller parties and in ideologically more extremist left-wing parties. Overall parties are thus drifting further apart from their voters on the EU dimension.

Notes

1. Low levels of opinion congruence between parties and the electorate do not rule out policy responsiveness. The EU’s policy outputs can be, and probably are, in many ways influenced by public opinion trends and citizens’ concerns (e.g. Carrubba 2001; Franklin and Wlezien 1997).

2. There appears to be no consensus on which factors work for and against effective policy representation on the left–right dimension. The only broader project that focused exclusively on comparing policy representation in different countries was Miller et al. (1999), which employed largely comparable elite and citizen data from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United States. Interestingly, the authors of that volume reached quite divergent conclusions about the relationship between electoral and party system features and opinion congruence. For a good review of the literature, see Powell (2004).

3. The study by Rohrschneider and Whitefield was based on an expert survey executed in 2003–2004 in 10 post-communist countries (seven of which joined the EU in 2004 or 2007). Their citizen data was from the Candidate Barometer survey conducted in the autumn of 2003.

4. For more information on the reliability of the various data used for measuring party positions, see the ‘Special Symposium: Comparing Measures of Party Positioning: Expert, Manifesto, and Survey Data’, in Electoral Studies 26:1 (2007) and the references therein.

5. This result is not explained by the fact that the member states included in the 2004 study were partly different from the ones in the 2009 study. We repeated the analysis using only those countries that were included in the 2004 study, but the results did not change significantly.

6. In Table 3 we use exactly the same model specification as Mattila and Raunio (2006) used in their analysis of the 2004 European elections data. In this sense, the coefficients are comparable between these two studies. One must bear in mind, however, that our data from 2009 covers more member states than the analysis from 2004.