Partisan responses to Europe: the role of ideology for national political parties' positions on European integration

Abstract

This article re-examines and evaluates several hypotheses regarding the way national political parties position themselves with respect to European integration. By using a pooled cross-sectional panel of data on references to Europe in the election manifestos of political parties in 16 West European countries between 1970 and 2003, I present further evidence that their stances on European integration are largely determined by their ideology, here measured by the locations of the parties within party families and their general orientation along the left/right ideological continuum. However, notable changes have occurred and the influence of ideology has diminished, as most parties have adopted more favourable positions towards the European project over time. Nonetheless, it is too early to disregard the connection between left/right and pro/anti integration, since many marginal parties are still taking oppositional stances that are strongly related to their ideological commitment.

Keywords:

• European integration
• ideology
• party manifestos
• policy positions
• political parties
• pooled panel data

Notes

1 One exception is Marks et al.'s (2002) novel study on the area, on which this article is to some extent based. However, their study provides somewhat ambiguous and unreliable results, because the authors did not take into account the highly autocorrelated dependent variable when time-pooling their expert survey data. That is, we cannot be sure that these results are reliable, since not controlling for autocorrelation may lead to an upward bias in estimates of the statistical significance of coefficient estimates.

2 Previous studies investigating the party–electorate link on European integration (e.g. Carrubba 2001; Ray 2003; Steenbergen et al. 2007; Wessels 1995) argue that the causality could run in both directions; i.e. voters may take cues from party elites simultaneously as party elites try to match voters' preferences. Reciprocal causation cannot be ruled out, but in this study I follow Marks, et al. (2002) and assume a one-way causality between voter opinions and party positions on European integration.

3 Danish and Finish parties are overrepresented in avoiding references to European integration in their election manifestos.

4 Nonetheless, regardless of shortcomings there is evidence that the manifesto data provide reasonable proxies for the actual positions of parties (Volkens 2007) which correspond fairly well with those obtained from expert surveys of party positions (Marks et al. 2007; Ray 2003: 983; Ray 2007). For instance, simple correlation analysis of data pertaining to the dependent variable in this study with data in the Chapel Hill expert surveys, yielded moderately to strong correlations, with Pearson's correlation coefficients (r) of 0.62, 0.70, 0.65, 0.71, 0.66 and 0.61, for the years 1984, 1998, 1992, 1996, 1999 and 2002, respectively.

5 The ‘effect size’ is a measure of the strength of the effect of an independent variable or a group of related variables. The effect sizes are calculated using the omega-squared statistic. Omega-squared is defined as: ω2 = SS _between – (k− 1)MS _error /SS _total + MS _error , and the effect size as: f⌢ = √ ω²/1 − ω² These were estimated in separate ANOVA analyses.

6 Substantively analogous results were obtained using ordinary lease squares (OLS) with a lagged dependent variable (to account for the serial correlation) and Newey-West estimation robust to arbitrary heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation.

7 One exception among the group of right-wing nationalist parties, which are usually most anti-integration, is the relatively Euro-positive Alleanza Nazionale in Italy in the 1990s. Owing to a rather small sample size for that party group, this party had to be removed from the data set as it constituted a severe outlier.

8 This is because this party family is similarly Euro-sceptic to the reference category.

9 Parties in the founding members of the EU (i.e. Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands) along with parties in Spain and Portugal are particularly positive towards European integration. The most Euro-sceptical parties can be found in Austria and Scandinavian countries.