Fleeing the centre: the rise of challenger parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis

Abstract

The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe.

Keywords:

• Challenger parties
• mainstream parties
• euro crisis
• party competition
• voting behaviour

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Julian Hoerner for excellent research assistance and the European Research Council for generous funding. We are also grateful for the insightful comments from the anonymous reviewers as well as the participants in the workshop on ‘Re-Thinking European Integration in the Shadow of Crisis: Politics, Institutions and Governance’, organised by Brigid Laffan at the European University Institute, 2015.

Notes

1. Source: Eurostat (seasonally adjusted figures from May 2014).

2. Most of these challenger parties are also ‘niche parties’ (Adams et al. 2006; Meguid 2008) and/or ‘populist parties’ (Mudde 2007). However, in this article we focus specifically on government experience as the distinguishing factor, since it affects whether such parties can be held to account by voters and also their ability to challenge the mainstream policy consensus (van de Wardt et al. 2014). To check the robustness of our party classification in comparison to other measures, we have replicated all of our analyses using the standard Adams et al. (2006) operationalisation of niche parties based on the Comparative Manifesto Project classification of parties into party families. Parties belonging to the Green/Ecological (10), Communist/Socialist (20) and Nationalist (70) party families as well as Special Issue parties (95) with non-centrist niche ideologies are classified as niche parties. All our main findings hold using this alternative operationalisation (see Tables A2 and A3 in the Appendix). Table A4 in the Appendix lists all parties (in 2014) included in both the challenger and niche party categories.

3. Although party systems and party competition are beginning to stabilise in Central and Eastern Europe, these political systems are still characterised by high volatility which makes it difficult to clearly identify mainstream parties (Bakke and Sitter 2005).

4. Any cut-off point in terms of government experience to determine when a party is, or is not, a challenger party is somewhat arbitrary. However, this operationalisation both offers parsimony and captures parties without any recent government experience. Using a slightly different operationalisation that looks at post-war participation in government yields very similar results.

5. For parties scoring 5, we classify them on the basis of coalition partners or their membership of European Parliament political groups. Green parties are those parties whose ideology centres on the principles of green politics and environmentalism. The full list of challenger and mainstream parties can be found in the Appendix Table A4.

6. One exception is the Five Star Movement in Italy, which is very difficult to classify. Our results are robust to the classification of this party in either of the three challenger party categories.

7. Less than 100 per cent of vote shares were allocated, since only parties with over 1 per cent of the vote (or at least one MP) were classified. This estimate of challenger parties is therefore conservative, since most of these very small parties and candidates are likely to belong to the challenger party category.

8. Approximately 1100 respondents were interviewed in each EU member country, totalling 30,064 respondents. Our analysis only focuses on the 17 West European member states. The EES 2014 was carried out by TNS Opinion between 30 May and 27 June 2014. All the interviews were carried out face to face. More information can be found at: http://eeshomepage.net/voter-study-2014, where the EES questionnaire can also be found.

9. One issue is the coding of non-voters. We have excluded all people who refused to answer the previous vote question (9 per cent of respondents) but included ‘don’t knows’ (2 per cent of respondents) as non-voters along with the 23 per cent of people who stated that they did not vote previously. In terms of current party support, we include anyone who did not give a party name as a non-voter, including people who answered ‘don’t know’, did not give an answer, and people who specifically said that they would not vote. In total this includes 32 per cent of respondents. The only difference we make in terms of coding challenger party support is to categorise support for very minor parties that fail to make the 1 per cent threshold that we applied to the aggregate data.

10. Respondents were asked about the extent to which they agreed/disagreed with the following statements on an 11-point scale: ‘You are fully in favour of the redistribution of wealth from the rich to the poor’; ‘You are fully in favour of raising taxes to increase public services’; ‘You are fully in favour of a restrictive policy on immigration’, ‘The EU should have more authority over the EU Member States’ economic and budgetary policies’; ‘Environmental protection should always take priority even at the cost of economic growth’.

11. We have also recoded ‘don’t know’ responses to the mid points of the scale (6) in order to maximise the number of cases included in the models. Don’t knows make up 4–5 per cent of the responses, and including them in this way makes no material difference to the results.

12. The occupational social class categories are self-employed, managerial, professional, white-collar worker, skilled manual worker, unskilled manual worker, student, unemployed and out of the labour force. Education is based on terminal age of education and consists of three categories: education finished before 16, education finished before 19, education finished at 20 or over. Religiosity is measured using church attendance divided into four categories: weekly, monthly, yearly and never. Age is measured in years, trade union members are distinguished from non-members and citizens are distinguished from non-citizens.

13. Table A1 in the Appendix shows similar models that look at mobilisation from non-voting to voting for the different party types. The results here echo, albeit more weakly, the same processes that we see for defection from mainstream parties. Moreover, as we might expect, mobilised voters are more politically interested than those that remain non-voters, but there are no real differences in how political interest affects mobilisation to different types of party.