Red Europe versus no Europe? The impact of attitudes towards the EU and the economic crisis on radical-left voting

Abstract

The 2014 European Parliament election saw a relatively large increase in the size of radical-left parties (RLPs), particularly in Western Europe. This article aims to provide new ways of thinking about the dynamics of radical-left voting by analysing the changing role of attitudes towards the European Union in explaining support for RLPs at European Parliament elections during the Great Recession. It is argued that the Europeanisation of economic issues during the financial crisis, together with the particular kind of Euroscepticism advocated by these parties, have enabled them to successfully attract a heterogeneous pool of voters. Using the 2009 and 2014 European Election Studies, it is shown that the effect of negative opinions about the EU on support for RLPs increased significantly during the crisis. In addition, support for RLPs also increased among voters with positive views of the EU who were nevertheless highly dissatisfied with the economic situation.

Keywords:

• Radical left
• Euroscepticism
• economic crisis
• European Parliament elections
• voting behaviour

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank attendees at the ECPR General Conference (Montreal, 26‒29 August 2015), the EUCE workshop on ‘the State of Demoracy in the EU’ at McGill University (31 August 2015), and the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (San Francisco, 3‒6 September 2015) for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their very thoughtful suggestions. Both authors contributed equally to this work.

Notes

1. Fifty-four if we count MEPs from the Communist Party of Greece, which left the group in 2014.

2. The only major party within this last strand was the Italian Communist Party before its dissolution in 1991.

3. In practice, differences are very minor. The Portuguese Communist Party does not advocate complete withdrawal from the EU but its hollowing out through its transformation into an intergovernmental organisation for the cooperation between ‘free and equal sovereign states’ and the reversal of economic integration (PCP 2014).

4. As expressed by the Party of European Left: ‘Popular sovereignties have been flouted by the centralisation of powers in technocratic institutions executed by the “Troïka” (the IMF, the ECB and the European Commission)’ (PEL 2013: 5).

5. Consistent with the literature, Sinn Féin has been excluded from the Irish case due to its history as a nationalist party. Results (available on request) do not change with its inclusion.