Divided by Europe: affective polarisation in the context of European elections

Abstract

As European integration has become politicised over the last several decades, scholars have paid keen attention to the role of identity in shaping political conflicts and contestation in Europe. This article investigates the microfoundation of the political divide over European integration by building on and extending theories of social identity and recent studies on affective polarisation. Large-scale survey experiment data from 25 European Union member states are analysed to explore the extent of divides over European integration. This analysis shows a statistically significant and substantively large magnitude of the divide based on European identity. Moreover, results show that this divide over European integration deserves particular attention as it is largely driven by out-group animosity, rather than in-group favouritism. Lastly, results show that electoral context, such as electoral salience, involvement in elections, elite polarisation, and the strength of Eurosceptic parties, influences the intensity of the European divide.

Keywords:

• European integration
• affective polarisation
• cleavages
• European identity
• elections

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the editors and the anonymous referees for their feedback throughout the review process. The authors gratefully acknowledge support of the Collaborative Research Center 884 ‘Political Economy of Reforms’ (SFB 884) at the University of Mannheim. SFB 884 has been funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). This work was supported by the research fund of Hanyang University (HY-2020).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 See Kuhn (2019) for an overview.

2 We borrow this expression from Helbling and Jungkunz (2020).

3 However, some seminal studies of electoral behavior (Tingsten 1937; Lazarsfeld et al. 1944; Berelson et al. 1954; Campbell et al. 1960) indeed provided a microlevel basis for earlier studies on cleavages and social conflict (Coser 1956; Dahl 1956; Lipset 1959; Rae and Taylor 1970).

4 See also Wagner (2021), Harteveld (2021a, 2021b), and Hernandez et al. (2020) for recent scholarship on affective polarisation in a comparative perspective. However, most of these studies focus on affective polarisation over political parties, except for a few studies.

5 See also Bornschier et al. (2021) and Helbling and Jungkunz (2020) for studies on political cleavages with a similar emphasis on social identity.

6 See, for example, Iyengar et al. (2012) that contrast policy-based division with affect-based division.

7 See also recent studies on European identity published in special issues on Journal of Common Market Studies (e.g. Kuhn and Nicoli 2020) and European Union Politics (e.g. Clark and Rohrschneider 2021).

8 While existing literature in social psychology have largely concluded that in-group favouritism is more dominant, there is also evidence that partisan bias is prompted more by out-group hostility in the United States (Iyengar and Westwood 2015; Carlin and Love 2018; Westwood et al. 2018).

9 See also Hahm (2016) that highlights the role of institutional configurations that affect partisanship both at the mass and elite levels.

10 We conducted the survey on a sample collected by Dynata (formerly SSI). This sample was selected to be broadly representative of the adult population with respect to age and gender in each of the 25 member states (see Tables A1 and A2 in the online appendix).

11 As described, we used the dictator games with hypothetical money and imaginary recipients. Recent studies in economics and psychology show some consistent evidence that subjects give similar amounts and discriminate between in-group and out-group to similar degrees in the hypothetical and incentivized dictator games (see Ben-Ner et al. 2008, 2009). Moreover, existing studies find that stakes tend to have little effect on average behavior and that games with larger stakes tend to generate data with less variance (Camerer and Hogarth 1999; Forsythe et al. 1994; List and Cherry 2008; Carpenter et al. 2005). Therefore, we expect that hypothetical dictator games would provide us with conservative estimates, which bolster our confidence in our findings. With respect to any potential ethical concerns, this study was reviewed and approved by the committee of the University of Mannheim and the data were collected in full compliance with the European General Data Protection Regulation. Before respondents started answering survey questions, they were informed that the survey is part of a scientific project through the informed consent document. The survey proceeded only after getting this consent. At the end of the surveys, we also debriefed them by stating that the content used in the experiments may not be based on facts.

12 We conduct several robustness checks based on different ways to categorize individuals with/without EU attachment. The results are consistent with the main analysis (see Figures A5 and A6 in the online appendix).

13 This finding compares with prior studies that show the variation in the salience of the conflict over European integration. For example, Hutter and Kriesi (2019) found a notable lack of politicization of European integration in Central and Eastern Europe.

14 We also replicate this study using trust games and find consistent results. Results are available upon request.

15 There exists a moderately high correlation of 0.49 between the two variables, elite polarisation and the strength of Eurosceptic parties. Despite a conceptual distinction, we use these two variables separately in alternative models to empirically clarify the respective effect of each variable.

16 In online appendix, we run the single-level equivalent, with standard errors clustered by respondents, to check the robustness of this model (see Table A5).

17 The intercepts therefore can be interpreted as the number of tokens allocated to Player 2 if he or she is in the in-group on the question of European integration, under otherwise typical conditions. Depending on the model, we see that respondents would allocate roughly 3.77 tokens, on average, to their in-group (refer to Models 6 and 7).

18 Due to the available number of countries, we are careful in drawing definitive conclusions about the role of country-level factors. Thus, our findings emphasize that there is substantial variation, within and across countries, in the extent of political divisions based on EU identity. The level of bias varies meaningfully with variables of electoral context.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hyeonho Hahm

Hyeonho Hahm is an Assistant Professor at Hanyang University. His research focuses on partisanship, institutional legitimacy, and dispute settlement. His work has appeared in International Organization, European Journal of Political Research, and Journal of European Public Policy. [[email protected]]

David Hilpert

David Hilpert is a doctoral student at the University of Mannheim. He is interested in institutional and electoral questions on international cooperation, particularly in the context of European Union. His work has been published in European Journal of Political Research and Political Science Research and Methods. [[email protected]]

Thomas König

Thomas König is Professor in Political Science at the University of Mannheim. His research focuses on European integration, party democracy and reforms, especially on the power distribution between the executive, legislative and judiciary as well as the influence of interest groups and public opinion. His work has appeared, among others, in American Political Science Review, American Journal of Political Science, and International Organization. [[email protected]]