When shifting backfires: the electoral consequences of responding to niche party EU positions

ABSTRACT

Recent research has shown that mainstream political parties shift their positions on European integration in response to threats from niche parties. Whether or not this strategy affects the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties remains unclear, however. Drawing on both spatial and issue competition models of party competition, this study examines how mainstream political party accommodation of niche party position on the issue of European integration affects mainstream party electoral success. Using fixed-effects panel regression models, we investigate the effect of mainstream parties becoming more Eurosceptic in the face of a radical right political party on the size of the mainstream party’s vote share. We show that position shifts towards Euroscepticism are detrimental to centre-right mainstream party success when faced with a radical right party that has seen more electoral success. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition and electoral responsiveness in the European Union.

KEYWORDS:

• European integration
• Euroscepticism
• issue competition
• niche parties
• party competition
• spatial theory

Acknowledgement

This paper has been previously presented at the MPSA, 5–8 April 2018 in Chicago and at the Politicologenetmaal 2019 at the University of Antwerp. We particularly would like to thank Jim Adams, Catherine de Vries, Lawrence Ezrow, Jae-Jae Spoon, Zeynep Somer-Topcu for their helpful comments. In addition, we would like to thank the referees for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maurits J. Meijers is Assistant Professor of Comparative Politics at Department of Political Science, Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, The Netherlands.

Christopher J. Williams is Assistant Professor of Political Science in the School of Public Affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, USA.

Notes

1 Importantly, parties can be considered issue owners of multiple issue simultaneously. The radical right’s ownership of the immigration issue does not preclude its ownership of ‘hard Euroscepticism’.

2 While we do not report in the main body of this study the effects of accommodation of the radical left on mainstream party vote shares, we examine this effect, reporting the results in the appendix. The results suggest little effect of mainstream party accommodation of radical left EU positions on mainstream party vote share. This fits with the understanding in the existing literature of radical right parties as the ‘issue owners’ of Euroscepticism (de Wilde and Trenz 2012; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2000; Williams and Ishiyama 2018).

3 For descriptive statistics, see Table A.1-A.3 of the appendix.

4 The United Kingdom Independence Party is not included in the CMP data as a ‘nationalist’ party. However, we include UKIP as a radical right party as it has been included as such in previous research (see Williams and Ishiyama 2018). Models excluding the UK show similar results to the main findings of this study.

5 We supplemented missing data on radical right success with with data from ParlGov (Döring and Manow 2018).

6 If multiple radical right parties competed in an election, the combined vote share was used.

7 Liberal parties with a right-left score above ‘0’ in the CMP data are coded as centre-right parties. Liberal parties with a right-left score below ‘0’ in the CMP data are coded as centre-left parties. Table A.4 shows how liberal parties were coded.

8 Models in which the Euro dummy variable are not included show similar effects for the main independent variables.

9 The Eurobarometer survey item which asks individuals if they believe their country’s membership of the EU is a ‘good thing, a bad thing, or neither good nor bad’ is available for 1979 to Spring 2010. Autumn 2010 onwards, the Eurobarometer survey series asked if individuals have a ‘very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, or very negative’ view of the EU. To get a full time-series, our measure of public Euroscepticism relies on both items by combining all ‘negatives’.

10 Ideally, we would control for EU salience using a measure of the percentage of people in a country who report viewing the EU issue as one of the most important problems (MIP) facing their country. Unfortunately, MIP data cannot be obtained for all countries in this study for the examined time period.

11 We have also estimated models (see Table A.9 in the appendix) in which the main independent variable was an interaction between mainstream party shift towards Euroscepticism and radical left party success (defining radical left parties as parties that are coded as ‘socialist’ in the CMP data). Overall, we do not find a robust effect of the interaction between mainstream party shift towards Euroscepticism and radical left success.

12 To assess the robustness of the results, we have also conducted a number of alternative analyses. These are outlined in the appendix.

13 The interaction between mainstream party EU shifts and radical left party success (t-1) is not significant (See Table A.9 in the appendix).