EU policy opposition within the post-2008 European parliament: scrutinising Eurosceptic political groups in competition

ABSTRACT

Euroscepticism is a well-established phenomenon in the European Parliament’s (EP) fold. Despite the increase of Eurosceptic actors within this institution during the past decade, the knowledge and understanding of the policy space in which Eurosceptic political groups compete with each other remain undeveloped in scholarly literature. This article addresses this gap by examining how the policy opposition led by these political groups has evolved in the post-2008 EP, notably during the legislatures of 2009, 2014, and 2019. This is done by scrutinizing the data collected from Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) and VoteWatch regarding the policy positions adopted by such groups, and, also, by applying a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) to their voting behaviour. The present study shows that the 2014 and 2019 legislatures have witnessed an intensification of the policy opposition within the EP fostered by the participation of new populist and Eurosceptic political actors.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroscepticism
• European parliament
• EU policy opposition
• EP political groups
• GAL/TAN

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for particularly helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The authors acknowledge that this study was conducted at the Research Centre in Political Science [UIDB/CPO/00758/2020], University of Minho/University of Évora, and was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) and the Portuguese Ministry of Education and Science through national funds.