The impact of EU intervention on political parties’ politicisation of Europe following the financial crisis

Abstract

This article examines the effect of the financial crisis and economic intervention by the European Union on political parties’ politicisation of the EU within national elections. Data from the Manifesto Project for elections between 2002 and 2017 in 12 Eurozone countries is used to assess how the crisis and intervention altered the saliency, position and clarity of parties’ EU policies. The analysis shows that the crisis only led to an increase in EU saliency in those states not subjected to intervention whilst intervention is actually associated with a decrease in the saliency of the EU. In terms of increasing Euroscepticism, intervention appears to exhibit a greater effect than the crisis although the results display marked asymmetry between different parties on the left and right. The same is observed to be the case for the level of blurring that parties are engaged in to mask their EU positions. The implications of the findings suggest that economic intervention within the EU has negatively impacted democracy in intervened-in member states by reducing the manoeuvrability of parties to provide voters with clear choices on the direction of European integration.

Keywords:

• European integration
• politicisation
• intervention
• political parties
• responsiveness

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to a number of colleagues, including Christel Koop, Rubén Ruíz-Rufino, Damien Bol and Edoardo Bressanelli, for their helpful advice throughout the research process. An earlier iteration of this article benefited from the feedback of the participants of the 2017 ECPR Political Parties Summer School (University of Nottingham) and the Department of Social Science Work-in-Progress seminar at the Universidad Carlos III (Madrid). I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and recommendations.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Stuart J. Turnbull-Dugarte is a doctoral candidate in Political Science and Teaching Assistant in Research Methods and European Politics at King’s College London. He works on comparative politics in the European Union and researches political parties, campaigns and electoral behaviour. He has published in journals including Electoral Studies and Research and Politics. [[email protected]]

Notes

1 The 12 EMU states included here are: Austria, Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain.

2 Greece and Ireland signed MoUs in 2010. Portugal signed a MoU in 2011. Spain and Italy were advised by the European Central Bank (ECB) they were required to implement an austerity package in 2011 should they wish to be considered for financial assistance in the future (both complied). Spain signed a MoU-like agreement in 2012 in exchange for capital for country’s struggling banks. Cyprus signed a MoU in 2013 but is not included in the 12 states in the analysis.

3 A manifesto would have a clarity score of 0 if its pro- and anti-EU statements were perfectly balanced (Adams et al. 2017) or 1 if its statements were 100% unidirectional.

4 Government debt as percentage of GDP. Data for macroeconomic indicators taken from the Comparative Political Data Set 1960–2016 (Armingeon et al. 2018). Data for the 2017 elections was taken from Eurostat.

5 In cases of coalition government, the main coalition partner.

6 All parties included in MARPOR are incorporated into the models but only left-wing, social democratic, and right-wing parties are used as subsample categories. Methodologically, I am unable to run subsample estimations based on each of the unique family codes in the dataset because of the very low number of certain family types in the data or because of lack of variation in these types over some of the main explanatory variables. Theoretically, green and communist parties tend to cluster around the same liberal-left political space (Whitefield and Rohrschneider 2019) so their ideological motivations in relation to Europe are likely to be in sync too. Grouping these parties together allows for the differentiation between parties whilst still facilitating a sufficient number of observations to allow for the application of the necessary estimation techniques.

7 Additional estimations in appendix. Despite the hierarchical data structure of parties and countries, multi-level modelling is inappropriate given the small N of higher-level observations (Bickel 2007).

8 The mean EU position of far-left parties is significantly more Eurosceptic (0.86) compared to social democrats (2.77) and those on the right (2.25). See Table A4 in the online appendix.

Additional information

Funding

This work received support from the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council under grant number ES/J500057/1.