EU issue voting in European member states: the return of the pro-EU voter

Abstract

In the member states of the European Union (EU), there are increasing signs of waning EU support, particularly in the form of anti-EU sentiment and voting. Yet, the salient role of pro-EU voting has not been side-lined entirely. Using a combination of data from EES and CHES that estimates the positional distance between voters and parties on the EU, the results suggest that voters are significantly mobilised on support for the EU. This is congruent to recent evidence that has shown that voters have rewarded parties with more polarised stances on the EU and, contrary to Eurosceptic party mobilisation, those parties with a more extreme pro-EU stance. Here, the more vocal a Europhile party, the more likely that citizens will vote for that party given their positional closeness to the EU. The findings in this article suggest the (re-) emergence of an EU dimension with mobilising effects on parties and voters and serious consequences for the dynamics of party competition.

Keywords:

• EU issue voting
• EU salience
• EU position
• EU distance

Acknowledgements

Nicolò Conti and Matthew Loveless would like to acknowledge support from the Transnational ERC grant #885026 directed by Liesbet Hooghe, which is housed at the Robert Schuman Centre, European University Institute.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In this article we measure party polarisation as the distance between a party individual position and the average position in the party system (see: Hobolt and De Vries 2015).

2 In the article, we do not differentiate between different types of EU issues (such as, for example, migration, economic policies, or enlargement) and we do not consider their specific implications on EU issue voting. Such specifications would be more suitable for a different research design that assumes an impact of EU issue voting and aims at assessing the discreet impact of each specific EU issue on it. We do not assume the impact of EU issue voting but we aim at assessing its broader impact, if it exists, across time on parties with (more extreme) Europhile/Eurosceptic stances, respectively.

3 We have excluded Cyprus, Luxembourg and Malta from the analysis, as these countries present a small population and they suffer from a low number of party and individual-level observations in both CHES and EES surveys.

4 The EES 2019 does not provide with a vote intention item on the upcoming general elections, with the only available item being the voting choice at the EP elections.

5 It is worth noting that Schmitt (2008) further differentiates EU policy and EU constitutional issues into two further categories: positional and valence issues. Our analysis does not consider this classification level.

6 In the Online Appendices (Appendix 4), as a robustness test, the three-way interactions presented in the main text (Figures 3, 4, and 6) have been replicated by splitting our sample separately for each year. Results are consistent with those presented in the main text.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Luca Carrieri

Luca Carrieri is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome. His research focuses on political parties, voting behaviour and EU integration. His work has appeared in journals such as Political Studies, Government and Opposition, Journal of Common Market Studies, Journal of European Integration, Political Studies Review among others. [[email protected]]

Nicolò Conti

Nicolò Conti is Professor of Political Science at the Unitelma Sapienza University of Rome. His research focuses on political parties, elites, public opinion and the domestic politics of EU integration. He is co-editor of South European Society and Politics. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Common Market Studies, European Union Politics, West European Politics, Government and Opposition, Party Politics among others. [[email protected]]

Matthew Loveless

Matthew Loveless is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Bologna and co-Director of the Centre for Research and Social Progress. His research focuses on European public opinion and political behaviour with recent publications in Political Studies, Government and Opposition and the Journal of Common Market Studies. [[email protected]]