Responsive voters – how European integration empowers Eurosceptic parties

ABSTRACT

European integration has been progressing even as support for Eurosceptic parties has been rising. Post-functionalist literature focuses on how public attitudes affect the progress of European integration (bottom-up), but the mechanism through which European integration affects domestic politics (top-down) is underexplored. Extreme parties on either the left or right are known to adopt a Polity-Eurosceptic agenda in order to realign the main domestic political cleavage and turn themselves into the new mainstream. We aim to contribute to this literature by arguing that the timing and type of EU events matter. Specifically, the vote for such Eurosceptified Pariah Parties increase with integration events that have a potential for high media profile, signal reduced state autonomy, and occur in proximity to national elections. Furthermore, we argue that even if mainstream parties may counter Eurosceptified Pariah Parties’ claims, the net effect is to ratchet-up electoral support for the latter. We support this argument by employing a mixed-method design using both a natural experiment approach (UESD for Spain’s 1993 election) and a model-based approach (all parties in 1979–2017 and a new event database). Results are robust to the usual confounders, and the exclusion of different classes of events and opportunistically-timed elections.

KEYWORDS:

• Euroscepticism
• democratic responsiveness
• UESD
• EU integration
• political cleavages

Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to Mark Copelovitch, Catherine de Vries, Emily Erikson, Ben Farrand, Simon Hug, Martijn Huysmans, Seth Jolly, Theresa Kuhn, Amir Lupovici, Giorgio Malet, Nina Obermeier, Sibel Oktay, Christina Schneider, Christian Rauh, Dominik Schraff, Julia Schulte-Cloos, Michal Shamir, Sam Van-Noort, 2019–2020 Fox International Fellows at Yale University, two anonymous reviewers, and participants in the 2019 Glendon Research Symposium on the European Union, York University, Toronto, the 13th annual conference on the Political Economy of International Organization, Vancouver, and European Politics Online Workshop for their helpful comments and encouragement. Inbar Sapir provided diligent research assistance.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 De Vries (2010), De Vries and Edwards (2009), Hernández and Kriesi (2016), Hobolt and de Vries (2015), Hobolt and Tilley (2016), Meguid (2005), Nicoli (2017), and Van Kessel et al. (2021).

2 Scholars of Euroscepticism distinguish between hard/principled/diffuse/unqualified resistance to integration and soft/contingent/specific/qualified objection to EU policies (Leruth et al., 2018; Taggart, 1998; Kopecký & Mudde, 2002; Szczerbiak & Taggart, 2008). Our definition of Eurosceptics is closer to the former, which regard all EU institutions and its entire political and bureaucratic elite as illegitimate.

3 De Vries (2010), Hernández & Kriesi (2016), Hobolt and Tilley (2016), and Nicoli (2017).

4 This is perhaps an extension of the literature that engages with the effect that spill-over effects from events in a different country may have on voters’ attitudes in another country (Minkus et al., 2019).

5 El Pais Web Archive. Retrieved January 16, 2020, from https://elpais.com/archivo/.

6 See discussion in Appendix 1 of one exception.

7 We use the OLS estimator because we assume that respondents treat the range of possible answers as linear. OLS coefficients are also easy to interpret. In Appendix 2 we demonstrate that H1 is supported even when the linearity assumption is relaxed.

8 Figure 4 (Outcome Missing) shows (see Supplemental data) that the two groups are not significantly different in their observed probability to answer the question, ruling out the possibility that post-treatment respondents were more motivated or discouraged to reply (selection bias).

9 Based on a search of El Pais Web Archive, the highest-circulating newspaper. Retrieved January 16, 2020, from https://elpais.com/archivo/.

10 Thus, a rise in the party’s share of the vote from 20 to 30 per cent is a 50 per cent increase. Measuring the simple change in the vote share (30 – 20 = 10) would make party observations within a single election co-dependent (all sum up to zero).

11 See Bakker et al. (2015). for the validity of this method.

12 While CHES does not specifically use such a category, we expect respondents to regard Polity-Euroscepticism as a more profound and fundamental opposition to integration than Policy-Euroscepticism, and thus a higher-ranking class on the ordinal scale. From a qualitative perspective, of the 101 parties (247 country-election-party observations) in our data that we classify as Polity-Eurosceptic, most (95 parties) are indeed in the post-1991 period (11 of which have existed earlier too).

13 Unless specified otherwise, percent change is calculated for all controls over the pre-election calendar year.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fox International Fellowship at Yale University and THE ISRAEL SCIENCE FOUNDATION [grant number: 184/17].

Notes on contributors

Yoav Raskin

Yoav Raskin is a Ph.D. candidate in The School of Political Science, Government and International Affairs at Tel Aviv University and a Fox Fellowship Alumnus at Yale University. He focuses on supranational democratic responsiveness in the EU, on the backdrop of political radicalization, and specializing in quantitative research. In his policy work, Yoav is a consultant working with governmental and impact clients in the Israeli education sector, where he provides strategic advice, and manages analytics projects.

Tal Sadeh

Dr. Tal Sadeh is senior lecturer, and head of the European Union studies program at the School of Political science, Governance and International Relations, Tel Aviv University. Research and teaching interests include international political economy, specifically the political economy of the EU, Eurosceptic politics, and politics of currencies and financial institutions.