Euroscepticism is here to stay: what cleavage theory can teach us about the 2019 European Parliament elections

ABSTRACT

In the 2019 European Parliament elections, Eurosceptic parties were able to consolidate their strong results from 2014. Based on a specified conceptualization of Euroscepticism, this article provides an overview of the Eurosceptic vote and argues that Eurosceptic parties have by now established themselves as a fixed part of the EU party system. It interprets Euroscepticism as the upshot of an emerging centre–periphery cleavage in EU politics. In analogy to the emergence of opposition to processes of administrative centralization and cultural homogenization during nation-building, this perspective sees Euroscepticism as a reaction to the process of centre-formation at the European level, as a way of defending the specific cultural, economic and regulatory traditions of member states against the process of centralization of authority at the European level since the 1950s. The article concludes by discussing the implications of this argument for both EU scholars and practitioners.

KEYWORDS:

• European Parliament elections
• Euroscepticism
• cleavage theory
• centre–periphery cleavage
• pluralism
• consensus democracy

Acknowledgments

I am greatly indebted to Johanna Weber for her competent research assistance in compiling the vote and seat shares of Eurosceptic parties in the 2019 EP elections as well as the available data on the general positions of these parties. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Center for the Study of Democracy, Leuphana University Lüneburg. I am grateful to the participants of the Center’s Tuesday seminar for their comments and suggestions and in particular to Vera van Hüllen and Christian Welzel for inviting me to Lüneburg. I also wish to thank the editors and the anonymous referees for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Oliver Treib is professor of comparative policy analysis and research methods at the University of Münster.

Additional information

Funding

This research was carried out as part of the RECONNECT project, which has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 770142.