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The politicisation of European integration in domestic election campaigns
Abstract
How strongly is European integration being politicised in election campaigns, and what explains why a party chooses to emphasise Europe or, by contrast, remains silent about it? This article provides a systematic assessment of the salience of European integration in domestic election campaigns, tracking its development from the 1990s to the 2000s across six Western European countries based on media content analysis data. The findings show that the salience of Europe in election campaigns is actually rather limited when put into perspective by benchmarking it against other political issues. Moreover, ideological determinants are crucial in explaining European integration issue-emphasis. In particular, the more culturally conservative a party, the stronger its emphasis on Europe; the impact of the economic left–right divide, by contrast, is weaker and more ambiguous. However, Europe remains in the shadow of its twin issue, immigration, which shares a similar issue-emphasis pattern yet is more attractive to these culturally conservative parties.
... EU issues have undoubtedly gained importance in national election campaigns in recent decades, even though the extent to which these issues are politicized is still contested (see De Vries, 2007;Kriesi, 2007;Green-Pedersen, 2012, 2019Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016;Gross and Schäfer, 2020). On the one hand, this comes as no surprise since national elections are still mainly about domestic issues. ...
... We also argue that the temporal proximity of European and national elections contributes to the reduction of differences between Eurosceptic and non-Eurosceptic parties' EU issue emphasis. Eurosceptic parties should emphasize EU issues more than non-Eurosceptic parties at all types of elections because they want to signal that they provide a political alternative for voters unsatisfied with the consensus of mainstream parties in favour of further European integration (Hoeglinger, 2016). It is in their direct interest to 'keep the [EU integration] issue alive and on the political agenda' (Steenbergen and Scott, 2004, p. 189). ...
... The data is hierarchically structured, as party manifestos are written at a specific point within the national electoral cycle and are nested within countries. Given that these countries vary extensively in terms of the structure of party competition at the national level, we apply a multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regression with random intercepts at the country level to allow for varying mean emphasis of EU issue-levels across spaces (see Netjes and Binnema, 2007;Steenbergen and Scott, 2004;Hoeglinger, 2016). Using a Tobit regression is appropriate because the observations in the data can only take on positive values or zero for the dependent variable EU issue emphasis. ...
The emphasis national parties put on European Union (EU) issues in their manifestos varies to a great extent between countries. A systematic explanation of this variation is, however, still lacking. We address this gap by exploring the effect of the temporal proximity between national and European Parliament (EP) elections within the national electoral cycle on national parties’ EU issue emphasis. Multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions on a sample of 956 manifestos, produced by 340 parties running for national elections in 27 EU member states between 1979 and 2019, indicate that temporal proximity displays a positive effect on national parties’ EU issue salience: the closer in time EP elections are to national elections within the national electoral cycle, the more parties emphasize EU issues in their national election manifestos. This is particularly the case for non-Eurosceptic parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition in EU member states.
... Within the EU stream of evaluating politicisation, scholars such as Pieter de Wilde have built a common understanding of how to analyse politicisation (De Wilde 2007; De Wilde, Leupold, & Schmidtke 2016; De Wilde and , which involves three dimensions: salience, polarisation, and actor expansion. In this literature, salience refers to the importance of the EU and the integration process and this can be gauged by counting the number of newspaper articles that report on EU issues or policies Hoeglinger 2016;Leupold 2015;Schmidtke 2016). Others have assessed salience by gauging the extent to which citizens are acquainted with the EU, its institutions and policies (Baglioni and Hurrelmann 2016). ...
... Others have assessed salience by gauging the extent to which citizens are acquainted with the EU, its institutions and policies (Baglioni and Hurrelmann 2016). Salience has also been measured by the amount of statements made by party representatives (Hoeglinger 2016) or the number of parliamentary questions regarding EU topics (Wonka 2016). ...
... Appealed cases are likely to follow more typical patterns of cultural or "identitarian" conflicts that are usually associated with the EU's politicisation. This usual type of politicisation sees Eurosceptic forces driving the politicisation of European integration (see Hoeglinger 2016;Hooghe and Marks 2009;Kriesi 2016). Thus, these types of cases are more likely to create a politicisation that might be negative for the EU's legitimacy (see Figure 3.1). ...
The politicisation and depoliticisation of EU policies such as state aid are key to the legitimation and contestation of the EU. However, the existing literature tends to focus on analysing these processes either in terms of politicisation or depoliticisation, but rarely both simultaneously. Rather, this thesis conceptualises politicisation and depoliticisation as embodying a fluid-like state within Multilevel Governance (MLG) structures, such as the EU, where agents play a key role. The thesis first explores 266 state aid cases labelled "Unlawful with Recovery of Aid" (UWRA) to identify which were appealed, and to gauge the degree of news coverage that each case gained. From the analysis of the 266 cases, the dissertation selects the cases of Apple in Ireland and Ilva in Italy for sustained and detailed analysis. It explores how actors have sought to politicise and depoliticise these state aid cases in the national news media. A claims-making analysis is performed to understand how actors attempt to legitimise or delegitimise their own actions or the actions of the other actors involved (the Commission, Apple, Ilva and the Irish and Italian governments). To perform the analysis, a set of 100 newspapers were gathered from the Factiva database, including two leading quality newspapers (centre-left and centre-right) from Ireland (the Irish Times and the Irish Independent) and Italy (Il Sole 24 Ore and La Repubblica). The results show that a key moment in the trajectory of both the politicisation and depoliticisation of a state aid case is the act of appealing by the member state. More specifically, in the Apple case, TINA (There Is No Alternative) was used as a strategy to discursively depoliticise the action of appealing which, interestingly contributed to the overall politicisation of the state aid case. In contrast, other depoliticising strategies ("appeasing" claims) which intended to calm past tensions between the Italian government and the Commission were used successfully. In terms of politicisation, the Apple case showed an "international conflict trajectory" (Irish government versus the Commission) while the Ilva case raised concerns about the Italian government and the management of the corporation. Overall, this dissertation advances understandings of the differentiated patterns of politicisation and depoliticisation by illustrating that the Apple case followed the "politics against policy" route while this was avoided in the Ilva state aid case.
... This is essentially the question of programmatic adaptation pointed at by Ladrech (2002), which requires the researcher to consider what new positions political parties adopt in order to adapt to EU integration, and which ones they have to leave behind. It can also include considerations on the salience of EU issues in party programmes and campaigns (Marks and Steenbergen, 2004;Hoeglinger, 2016;Maier, Adam and Maier, 2017), a topic that tells us something about how central the EU becomes for them. ...
... I identified three promising areas of research: the study of the ideologisation of Europe, the analysis of the Europeanisation of ideology, and finally, the challenges and opportunities offered by these processes. In times of change for (and of) the EU (Vasilopoulou, 2023), of growing politicisation of European integration (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016), and of the return of ideological divisions after a period of seeming convergence (Hay, 2007;Mair, 2013), understanding how the notion of ideology might be relevant to parties' approaches to the EU seems particularly important. Even though one might argue that political parties and party democracy are in decline, political parties still play a key role in democratic politics, as they provide the linkage between institutions and citizens, particularly through the articulation of ideas about what politics is and what policies should be enacted (Gaffney, 1996). ...
There is a persistent narrative in European Union politics that presents the EU as 'non-ideological'. A closer look, however, reveals that EU integration has been (and still is) the source of multiple ideological struggles, especially for political parties. However, we still know little about how parties interpret European integration through ideological lenses and how this in turn affects (if at all) their existing ideological commitments. This paper sets itself the task of conceptualising the relationship between political party ideology and the process of European integration. It argues that there are two ways to study this relationship. The first is to focus on the 'ideologisation' of Europe and bring attention to how parties interpret European integration in light of their existing beliefs. The second approach looks at how these adaptations affect parties' existing commitments, leading to a 'Europeanisation' of ideology. Both processes generate tensions parties must navigate and opportunities they can take advantage of.
... . Thus, EU mobilisation is no longer limited to radical parties but includes mainstream ones as well. Subsequently, a broad consensus has emerged in the literature about the increased politicisation of European integration in member states (Hoeglinger 2016;Hurrelmann et al. 2015), which consists of divides resulting in increased issue salience (visibility), actor expansion (range) and actor polarisation (positional direction) regarding conflict over the EU (Hutter and Grande 2014;Hutter and Kriesi 2019). ...
... In addition, scholarship has defined positional shifts on the pro-/ anti-EU dimension as an important part of the EU conflict Hoeglinger 2016;Hutter and Grande 2014;Hutter and Kriesi 2019). By expressing an extreme position on a certain issue, a political party may achieve a boost in that issue's visibility, while at the same time, if a party adopts moderate stances on a policy, it often aims to underplay that issue (De Vries 2010). ...
In the member states of the European Union (EU), there are increasing signs of waning EU support, particularly in the form of anti-EU sentiment and voting. Yet, the salient role of pro-EU voting has not been side-lined entirely. Using a combination of data from EES and CHES that estimates the positional distance between voters and parties on the EU, the results suggest that voters are significantly mobilised on support for the EU. This is congruent to recent evidence that has shown that voters have rewarded parties with more polarised stances on the EU and, contrary to Eurosceptic party mobilisation, those parties with a more extreme pro-EU stance. Here, the more vocal a Europhile party, the more likely that citizens will vote for that party given their positional closeness to the EU. The findings in this article suggest the (re-) emergence of an EU dimension with mobilising effects on parties and voters and serious consequences for the dynamics of party competition.
... This paper builds on the literature on the politicization of the European integration process (e.g. Hooghe and Marks 2009;Hoeglinger 2016;Hutter and Kriesi 2019), the literature on EU issue voting (e.g. De Vries and Tillman 2010;De Vries and Hobolt 2016), and recently published work on pro-European counterreactions among parties and voters (e.g. ...
... Even if the issue of European integration obviously relates to the European level, the nation states are In general terms, politicization encompasses the process of the expansion of the publicly visible conflict regarding European integration (Hutter and Grande 2014;Hutter and Kriesi 2019), which is accompanied by increasing issue salience, actor polarization, and actor expansion (De Wilde et al. 2016;Kriesi 2016). Politicization is not restricted to the party level (Hoeglinger 2016) but also becomes visible at the voter level (De Wilde 2011). Still, the literature on politicization focuses primarily on the party level. ...
The increasing success of Eurosceptic parties and multiple European crises have fostered the politicization of European integration. However, we know little about how pro -European voters behave in this politicized environment. How important is European integration for pro-European voters? Do they care more about European integration when their vision of Europe is increasingly contested? The past 15 years have been characterized by persistent politicization of Eurosceptic parties and an increasing willingness of Europhile parties to engage with European topics. Moreover, European crises illustrated potential consequences of political disintegration. I expect these developments to be reflected in an increasing salience of European integration among pro-European voters. I derive salience estimates from spatial vote models encompassing four issue dimensions to track the development of salience. I use data from the European Social Survey, the European Election Studies, and the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, which cover many EU member states between 2008 and 2019. The results show that the salience of the European integration issue is most pronounced among Eurosceptic voters, while it is less pronounced among pro-European voters. However, in countries with a successful Eurosceptic party, it is more likely that the European integration issue also matters to pro-European voters. Moreover, there has been an increasing trend over time that European integration is not only important for anti- but also for pro-European voters across Europe.
... Социологи и политологи активно изучают аспекты политизации этнических [Авксентьев, 2020], религиозных [Пинкевич, 2020], гендерных [Дуброва, 2013], возрастных групп [Симонова, 2019], вопросы политизации социальных институтов, таких, как спорт [Кильдюшов, 2015], наука [Галлямов, 2019], искусство [Круглова, 2016], а также отдельных социальных проблем, таких, как, например, экологическая проблема [Чмель, 2020]. Аналогичным образом и зарубежные авторы уделяют изучению политизации определенное внимание [Hutter, 2021;Hutter, 2014;Grande, 2018;Hoeglinger, 2016;Miao, 2021;Góra, 2021;Bélanger , 2021;Costa, 2019;De Bièvre, 2020;Zürn, 2019;Wiesner, 2020]. ...
... 2. Подобная постановка исследовательской задачи требует наличия достаточной эмпирической базы. При этом обращает на себя внимание то обстоятельство, что методология большинства исследований политизации в настоящее время ориентирована на фиксацию уже результатов политизации, выражающихся в изменении позиции отдельных партий [Hutter, 2021;Grande, 2018], электоральных предпочтениях [Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter, 2014], изменениях тематической повестки средств массовой информации или социальных сетей [Miao, 2021], изменения уровня конфликтности в обществе [Авксентьев, 2020]. Представляется, что для изучения начального этапа структурирования политического поля из аполитического пространства данные методики не вполне адекватны. ...
The subject of this study is the processes of politicization. The authors proceed from the position that the mechanisms of the formation of political space in previously apolitical social structures, groups, phenomena can and should be fixed in concrete empirical studies. As markers of the emergence of political space, the authors of the article consider the politicization of actors and the politicization of the agenda fixed in political identity with the subsequent formation of competing groups on its basis, the objectification of the power dimension of previously apolitical structures, the growth of conflict and the transfer to the public space of the discussion about the principles of the distribution of power, the foundations of power. In order to confirm the validity of these markers, the authors conduct an empirical study of the politicization of participants in the international postcard exchange project «Postcrossing». The authors propose a research methodology based on the content analysis of user comments on the website of this project. The conducted empirical research allows us to demonstrate the mechanisms of the formation of political space in the process of politicization and confirms the importance of previously defined markers of politicization.
... However, in recent years, the pattern of competition between government and opposition (including the mainstream opposition) has also been interested by competition over the EU (Dolezal and Hellström, 2016;Charalambous et al., 2018). Ultimately, a broad consensus has emerged in the literature about the increased politicization of European integration in member states (Hurrelmann et al., 2015;Hoeglinger, 2016). This process consists of divides resulting in increased issue salience (visibility), actor expansion (range) and actor polarization (positional direction) regarding conflict over the EU (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hutter and Kriesi, 2019). ...
... In addition to that, scholarship has defined policy shifts on the pro/anti-EU dimension as an important part of the EU conflict (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Grande and Hutter, 2016;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter and Kriesi, 2019). By expressing an extreme position on a certain issue, a political party may actually boost that issue's visibility, while, when a party adopts moderate stances on a policy, it often aims to overshadow that issue (De Vries, 2010). ...
This article analyzes the influence of the EU party-voter distance on party support moderated by the impact of EU salience. To this goal, we focus on the party-voter dyad and we analyze patterns of EU issue voting in first-order national elections in five EU countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, and the Netherlands) between 2017 and 2018. We make use of a combination of data from CHES and a public opinion survey to construct the distance measures, and a mix of CHES and Twitter data to measure EU salience. We show that voters are mobilized on the EU, with EU party positions operating as a driving factor of the voting preferences of the electorate and EU salience moderating this relationship.
... There is evidence that parties politicize European Integration (Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016). Through the analysis of national campaigns in five Western European countries, Hutter and Grande (2014) show that the so-called 'elite consensus' on the pace of European integration had started to disappear as early as the mid-1980s. ...
... The greater diversity of cues seems to inform citizens and foster them to adopt more different attitudes. This finding seems to confirm previous research on the topic, indicating that the issue of European integration is no longer consensual for political parties and citizens (for instance, de Vries, 2007;Hooghe and Marks, 2009;de Wilde, 2011;Hutter and Grande, 2014;Hoeglinger, 2016). ...
... The rise of Eurosceptic parties in EU member states, the rejection of the Constitutional Treaty in national referenda in France and the Netherlands in 2005, public protest against the austerity measures imposed by the EU in the Eurozone crisis in South European countries, and not the least the negative outcome of the Brexit referendum in the UK in 2016 signal the end of the 'permissive consensus' (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970) which had facilitated European integration in the post-WW II decades. These developments have been reflected in a burgeoning literature on the 'politicization of Europe ' (de Wilde, 2011;de Wilde et al., 2014;Grande and Hutter, 2016;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter et al., 2016;Hutter and Grande, 2014;Risse, 2014;Trenz, 2013, 2015;Zeitlin et al., 2019). Inspired by postfunctionalist integration theory (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), this literature shows that European integration has become a matter of 'mass politics' (Bartolini, 2005;Hutter et al., 2016) with a substantial amount of politicization in public and parliamentary debates, election campaigns and national referenda. ...
... The literature covering EU-issue voting suggests that voters rely increasingly on European issues when casting their ballots in national elections. Empirical studies show that there was a significant number of national elections in EU member states in the post-Maastricht period in which Europe has been a politicizing issue, even if its salience has been lower than major economic and social policy issues Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter and Grande, 2014). Accordingly, if the issue of Europe is playing an increasing role in first-order national elections, it may also serve as a politicizing force in second-order European elections. ...
Based on original data, this article analyses the politicization of European issues in European elections. Contrary to scholarly expectations, our findings show a higher level of politicization of European issues compared to national elections. However, politicization has been declining in both electoral arenas from the early 2000s until 2014 despite the increasing visibility of radical Eurosceptic parties. This paper suggests that this decline in politicization is a consequence of relatively low levels of emphasis put on the EU issue by mainstream political parties. It argues that Eurosceptic parties have had a paradoxical effect on politicization, since mainstream parties have responded to the former's mobilizing efforts by de‐emphasizing European issues rather than pursuing a confrontational strategy. This finding is corroborated by the 2019 elections, where we observe remarkably high levels of politicization in those countries where mainstream parties have been forced to open the debate around European issues.
... Traditionally, the literature on issue politicization has focused on contentious and politically divisive issues such as European integration (Green-Pedersen, 2012;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hooghe & Marks, 2009;Hutter et al., 2016) or immigration (Gessler & Hunger, 2022;Green-Pedersen & Otjes, 2017;Hutter & Kriesi, 2022). In these cases, literature posits that a 'permissive consensus' (Hooghe & Marks, 2009) was disturbed by a politicization of the issue under study. ...
How do democratic actors rhetorically politicize their own disempowerment? Autocratization as a gradual process not only erodes democracy, but also progressively reduces the power of domestic actors to oppose this erosion. Often, incumbent governments disable the institutions meant to hold them accountable, such as parliaments. Drawing on the case of Hungary, we study how (opposition) parties rhetorically politicize democracy within the institution of parliament. As a case of rapid autocratization, Hungary saw far-reaching changes, including the transformation or abolition of many democratic institutions over the past years. New laws also restricted the rights of parliament itself, thereby narrowing the opportunities for public debate around democratic procedures. We address two questions related to this: To which extent do opposition parties politicize democracy and its procedures in a context of autocratization? And how does the way they talk about democracy differ from that of the government? The paper uses text-as-data methods – namely a dictionary of democratic principles and a word-embedding-based analysis of democracy rhetoric – to study parliamentary debates between 2010 and 2022. We find that democracy is highly salient for both the government
... The empirical focus on the relationship between perceived ownership and the level of attention to issues (Druckman et al., 2009;Klüver & Sagarzazu, 2016;Petrocik, 1996;Simon, 2002;Wagner & Meyer, 2014) ultimately ignores or downplays the possibility of overlap. Most studies examining the extent of overlap versus distinction focus on single issues of limited salience (Farstad, 2018;Hoeglinger, 2016). It is unclear how these findings on single issues fit into the more general picture of party attention across all issues. ...
Dominant visions of modern representative democracy posit that parties focus on contrasting issues during campaigns, leading to a diverse political supply. However, there is remarkably little empirical evidence to back up those claims. We argue that parties have little incentives to leave potentially rewarding issues to rivals. Lacking knowledge about their electorate and its short-term preferences, parties will monitor competitors and take up issues from each other. Empirical analyses covering all policy issues in a unique set of seven diverse advanced democracies over four decades are consistent with our predictions. Issue attention appears to be mostly inspired by rivals’ emphases, resulting in “tunnels of attention”. The model holds when introducing the alternative explanation of responsiveness to voters, corroborating the endogenous nature of tunnels of attention. Our new perspective has wide-ranging implications for party competition and representation.
... Along these lines, the politicisation of the EU may be observed through three main dimensions: 1) increased visibility of the EU and its policies, 2) increased polarisation and 3) increased engagement with the EU (De Wilde, Leupold & Schmidtke 2016;De Wilde 2015). The majority of scholars detect the greater politicisation of the EU over time (Hutter & Grande 2014;Hoeglinger 2016) due to the EU having stronger exposure in the public and the media (Krašovec & Lajh 2024). ...
Ever since Slovenia became independent, the European idea has been viewed fondly by the political elite and the public. The absence of any successful Eurosceptic parties has meant the main goals concerning European integration became national projects. Euroscepticism has remained limited, although in more recent years politicisation has steadily grown through political parties’ positions on EU issues. At the same time, the country’s political elite has lost sight of the specific strategy Slovenia should play in the EU. Moreover, alignment with other EU member states has begun to vary depending on the ruling party. After twenty years of membership, this has led to Slovenia being seen as one of the more submissive actors in EU policymaking. In the article, by applying an analytical framework of politicisation, we consider the changing attitudes to the EU in Slovenia through the twenty years of its membership. The central research question is: in which ways have European issues become politicised over the last twenty years in Slovenia? The research question is addressed by considering a chronological approach and analysis of events, participation in European elections and public opinion data. We argue that, as a newer member state, Slovenia politicises European issues to a limited extent.
... Additionally, their anti-EU position and rhetoric unfolds best in opposition. Without governmental responsibility, they can offer simplified solutions to complex integration issues (Hoeglinger 2016). In government, these parties may have to reduce their Eurosceptic rhetoric (Helbling, Hoeglinger, andWüest 2010, Sitter 2001). ...
... However, the "level," "scope," and "inclusiveness" of EU decision-making (De Wilde and Zürn 2012) have increased so much that hardly any national policy domain is now devoid of a European-level governance aspect. Different political forces within member states seek to build linkages between the EU and different policy issues (Hoeglinger 2016), framing Europe as a matter of democracy, neoliberalism, identity, social protection, and so on (Pareschi 2023). And although Whitefield and Rohrschneider (2019) point to the formation of "integration families" within the mainstream left and right, numerous accounts portray mainstream parties as having sought to defuse the "maverick" issue of integration or embed it in traditional patterns of competition in order to thwart its unsettling potential (Mattila and Raunio 2006). ...
... Regularly holding executive positions at national and European levels and traditional decisiontakers for the integration process, pro-European elites intentionally bypass EU affairs during the electoral campaign, leaving free rein to the Eurosceptic forces. This occurs due to the difficulties of the mainstream parties in positioning European integration within the left-right ideological axis Hoeglinger, 2015). In simpler terms, mainstream parties struggle to embed a European political vision within the Christian-conservative, Social and Liberal ideologies, failing to update their discourse to the mutated scenario. ...
The Maastricht Treaty remains a crossroad in the history of European integration. Since its ratification, policy areas at the core of the national sovereignties have been included in the Brussels agenda, the power balance between the European institutions has started to mutate, and the European Union affairs have progressively become a controversial issue in the public debate. The goal of the book is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the politicization of European affairs. The final aim is to assess the institutional and socio-political impact of EU politicization, detecting how the European elites could exploit the saliency gained by European affairs to enhance the legitimacy and effectiveness of the European institutions.
... Moreover, both countries have a similarly high vote share of hard Eurosceptic parties in parliament (de Vries, 2018), so we may expect more vocal opposition at home. In the comparative literature on the politicisation of EU issues, the Netherlands and Austria rank slightly above the average (Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). In terms of formal scrutiny rights of the national parliaments, both countries rank roughly the same, with Austria having more substantial formal rights of constraint and the Netherlands described as more fully involved in scrutiny (Auel, 2015). ...
The management of the COVID-19 crisis and, in particular, the Next Generation EU fund have shown that European leaders can find integrationist policy solutions despite increasing politicisation at home where democratic constraints may lead to a feared ‘multilevel politics trap’. Therefore, we ask whether and how national governments can manage such constraints and thus spring or avoid the trap. Theoretically, we argue that the agency of governments is a crucial factor for understanding the varying dynamics of politicisation in regional integration, as governments can raise or lower domestic audience costs by strategically interacting with their parliament or media. Empirically, we probe the plausibility of our theoretical propositions by examining constraint management and position-taking in Austria and the Netherlands in the context of European fiscal solidarity. Our results show that there is no inevitably self-reinforcing multilevel politics trap but that the effects of domestic constraint are, to a considerable extent, contingent on the agency of national governments.
... As the findings show, the processes of EU contestation exhibit a much more nuanced picture than the one depicted in classical studies on Euroscepticism (Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2002). This is not, however, the first study noting that EU contestation cannot be reduced to hard or soft Euroscepticism (see Hoeglinger, 2016;della Porta et al., 2017). The findings of this research demonstrate that more encompassing and flexible categories are necessary to capture the different forms of EU contestation that are exhibited by new challenging parties. ...
... In several regions of Europe, the significance of the EU as a political matter has grown over time (Carrieri, 2023) even though its salience is moderate compared with domestic issues such as, for example, immigration (Hoeglinger, 2016). Following both the Euro crisis and the refugee crisis, it is argued that the EU's role has faced further challenges, leading to a politicization of the matter (Hutter and Kriesi, 2019). ...
... This premise suggested that the creation of the 'European Union' increased the salience and polarisation of the regional integration topic, making it, for the first time, an important and divisive dimension in national politics. Since then, several studies have tested that claim and measured, over time, the magnitude of EU politicisation in different EU countries Höeglinger, 2016;. ...
This open access book focuses on the importance that EU politicization has gained in European democracies and the consequences for voting behaviour in six countries of the EU: Belgium, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. Through a detailed, multimethod analysis this book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts in the media and parliamentary debates, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.
... Yet, we believe our study is timely due to two new developments in the nature of the EU that arguably warrant more focus on this topic. First, the onset of the Eurozone crisis has been seen as an important moment for EU politicisation at the domestic level (De Vries, 2018;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hooghe & Marks, 2018;Hutter & Kriesi, 2019;Ruiz-Rufino & Alonso, 2017;Schäfer & Gross, 2020), and it has given rise to a large debate on the consequences of "Europe" for electoral behaviour Lobo & Lewis-Beck, 2012, Lobo & Pannico, 2020. Second, the nature of the EU has evolved from a regulatory to a distributional power (Börzel & Risse, 2018). ...
While the EU’s importance has grown for decision-making, both in politics and policies, following a decade of crises, its accountability mechanisms at the EU level have remained largely untouched. Most of the studies which research the way the EU is being legitimised focus on the European Parliament elections. In this book, we argue that to understand how EU accountability works, it is necessary to focus instead on national elections and the national political environment. While this channel of accountability has been long established, it still remains, to this day, poorly understood. Beyond establishing its importance, with a multi-methods approach and in comparative perspective, the book explores the national contexts which foster or discourage the expression of EU preferences at the national ballot box. Through a detailed analysis of longitudinal trends in EU politicisation in media and parliamentary debates from 2002 to 2019, as well as their impact on EU issue voting in national elections held between 2019 and 2021 in six European countries, the book establishes rigorously the paths of European accountability at the national level, its propitious contexts, and whether the paths are similar from Greece to Germany. The findings have implications for both national and European Union democracy, underlining the importance that national institutions have in enabling citizens to hold the EU accountable.
... This premise suggested that the creation of the 'European Union' increased the salience and polarisation of the regional integration topic, making it, for the first time, an important and divisive dimension in national politics. Since then, several studies have tested that claim and measured, over time, the magnitude of EU politicisation in different EU countries Höeglinger, 2016;Hutter & Grande, 2014;Hutter & Kriesi, 2019). ...
This chapter assesses the politicisation of the EU in six European countries, by looking at the media coverage of 29 legislative elections held between 2002 and 2017. Using a combination of automated and manual methods of content analysis, this chapter goes beyond the existing studies to examine how the Eurozone crises impacted the traditional media coverage of the EU not only in terms of magnitude but also in terms of framing and content. Using a unique dataset of 165,341 news items, from 12 mainstream newspapers, this study answers three questions relevant to the main goal of this book: (1) does EU politicisation vary between left- and right-leaning newspapers; (2) is there a difference between news and opinion articles in terms of EU salience and tone; (3) what dimensions of EU debates are more prevalent in the media. Our analysis shows that, after the crisis, the countries’ politicisation of the EU diverged more in terms of content than magnitude. However, when we only consider opinion articles, the differences within mainstream media, from the left and right, become more salient. These results confirm the role and importance of the media for EU politicisation and its potential impact on national politics.
... The implications of the Euro-and migration crises considerably changed the party competition in some EU countries, but this new development remains underresearched. Hoeglinger (2016) noted that our knowledge still relies only on anecdotal evidence, for example, from the EU Constitutional Treaty referenda or the Eurozone crisis. ...
This article contributes to the debate on domestic politicisation of EU issues by suggesting hitherto overlooked explanation of (non)politicisation. This paper uses Czechia as an intriguing case in which the mainstream explanations of a low level of domestic politicisation of EU issues do not apply. The Czech case illustrates that, first, even in the context of high public Euroscepticism, EU issues do not necessarily become politicised, particularly so when the public does not consider them to be important. Second, high politicisation does not occur when there is a path dependency of a mismatch between positions of political parties and significant parts of their electorates on EU issues. Finally, the rise of catch-all populist parties prevents a high level of politicisation of EU issues.
... The onset of the Eurozone crisis, which was seen as a further moment for EU politicization at the domestic level (Grande and Hutter 2016;Hoeglinger 2016;De Vries, 2018;Hooghe and Marks 2018;Kriesi 2019a, 2019b;Gross and Schafer, 2020), prompted a flurry of new research on the effects of "Europe" on political behavior. ...
... In such a setting, an issue is put on the agenda, deliberation about it occurs, interests around it are formed, and collectively binding choices can be made (Zürn 2019). Politicization implies issues of salience, actor expansion, and polarization (Grande et al. 2019, p. 1450, Hoeglinger 2016, Hutter and Grande 2014, p. 4, Hutter and Kriesi 2019). This often starts through discursive changes that challenge the institutional grammar of an established order, juxtaposing polarizing perspectives (Laclau 2005, Mouffe 2007). ...
With this introduction to the special issue on climate politics, democracy, and populism, we lay the ground for the multiplicity of analyses that follow. We highlight the essentially contested nature of concepts like (de-)politicization, populism, and democracy that reject the notion of a single definition. We do so by outlining what post-, de-, and re-politicization can mean, how diverse the perspectives on populism are, and which ones help guide us in this special issue. We present the different arenas where the politicization of climate change is happening and which mechanisms are at work, particularly concerning right-wing populism. We discuss our joint understandings of democratic governance and what challenges, as well as opportunities, populism brings to the table. We do not provide a single theoretical framework but rather a typology of the various understandings of these concepts to outline how each contribution relates to it.
... Thus far, EU politicisation has been analysed along multiple dimensions. For instance, scholars have focused on the EU issue dimension in the electoral market, for what concerns both voters' attitudes and party positions (Charalambous et al., 2018;De Vries & Hobolt, 2012;Eichenberg & Dalton, 2007;Hoeglinger, 2016;Mattila & Raunio, 2012). Moreover, they have looked at how the EU is politicised by Member State governments (Rauh et al., 2020); national legislatures (Wendler, 2014); civil society (Dolezal et al., 2016); and mass media (Statham & Trenz, 2012). ...
Despite receiving much attention in the literature, existing analyses on the impact of Covid-19 on European societies and politics do not investigate the consequences for party competition over the European Union (EU) dimension. To this end, this article asks whether the pandemic affected the salience of the EU issue and the related party positions in Italy during the ‘first wave’ of the crisis. The analysis relies on an original CrowdTangle dataset comprising around 24000 posts from parties’ official Facebook pages, which are thematically coded and subsequently employed in time-series cross-section regression models. The findings show that the pandemic caused a significant increase in salience and polarisation of the EU issue in the Italian party system.
... Research on the politicization of European integration documents how EU membership and further steps in the pooling of sovereignty have become contested (Hoeglinger 2016;Hurrelmann et al. 2015;Hutter et al. 2016;Statham and Trenz 2013). Many citizens see European integration as a threat to cherished national sovereignty (e.g. ...
... These are also dimensions and criteria that are used in a number of empirical accounts on politicisation and its relation to the EU and/or European integration that focus on the salience of EU issues, an increase of actor involvement, and an increase in party-political polarisation (e.g. Hoeglinger, 2015;Statham & Trenz, 2013, see the discussion in Kauppi, 2018). An assumption that is implicitly made in many accounts on EU politicisation is the one that is used by Schattschneider as well. ...
The concept of politicisation is increasingly used and discussed in current theoretical and empirical research on democracy in general, and on the European Union (EU) in particular. But it is often left unclear, what exactly is meant and understood by politicisation in the EU context, how is politicisation theorised, conceptualised, and operationalised, and what are the opportunities and the limitations that are linked to the different respective definitions and understandings of politicisation. This chapter rethinks the theoretical background and the operationalisation of EU politicisation by (a) outlining and summing up crucial questions and key points that are related to the understanding and the usage of politicisation as a theoretical and empirical concept in the debate on the EU, and (b) to develop both theory and conceptualisation of EU politicisation further, based on the discussions of the EU referendum debate in France 2005 and the European Parliament (EP) elections in 2019. The chapter concludes by arguing that bottom-up politicisation needs to be better included into politicisation research, while moving towards a multi-stage and multi-level concept of politicisation.
... Rather, the possible shift in polity contestation from the EU to the domestic level should also be considered. EU politicization has important repercussions on domestic politics (see e.g., Hoeglinger, 2016). EU debates contributed to delegitimizing democratic institutions and elites at the national level (Galpin & Trenz, 2019). ...
The UK’s referendum on EU membership that resulted in a narrow minority in favour of leave was followed by a leadership vacuum and intense debate about the implementation of the result. The politicization over Brexit resulted in the development of ‘Brexit identities’ of Remainers and Leavers that superseded party identities. We argue that in order to understand how this politicization took place despite a leadership vacuum we firstly need to look beyond the arena of formal party politics to more informal arenas of political contestation on social media, especially Facebook, and secondly understand the linkages between EU and national level politicization that polarised the country around new British-specific identities. Through this, we analyse the ‘politics of division’ not simply as a form of contentious politics driven by political parties, but as a social conflict driven by non-institutionalised groups, grassroots campaigns and ordinary citizens. We find evidence of significant mobilisation that extends beyond the realm of party politics but argue that this mobilisation cannot necessarily be considered entirely ‘grassroots’. Rather, it is driven not just by citizens but also shaped by mainstream and alternative media platforms. The debates cannot, however, be considered purely a form of EU politicization, rather, analysis of Facebook comments shows that politicization over Brexit through these campaigns is primarily contestation over the nature and legitimacy of British democracy. Because of this, we argue that social media is an essential site for the study of EU politicization and political campaigns in general.
... For about 30 years, European election campaigns have been characterized as secondorder elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980), meaning that not European issues but national topics have shaped the campaign agendas (e.g. De Vreese, 2009;Hoeglinger, 2016;Petithomme, 2012). It was especially the mainstream parties (De , which dominated electoral competition and government formation, that seemingly had little interest in giving salience to EU issues. ...
European elections have been described as second-order phenomena for voters, the media, but also parties. Yet, since 2009, there exists evidence that not only voters, but also political parties assign increasing significance to European elections. While initially ‘issue entrepreneurs’ were held responsible for this development, the latest campaigns have raised the question of whether mainstream parties are finally also campaigning on European issues. In this article, we examine European Union (EU) salience in the 2019 European Parliament (EP) campaigns of government and opposition parties and the predictors of their strategic behaviours. We test the relevance of factors derived from the selective emphasis and the co-orientation approach within an integrated model of strategic campaign communication based on expert evaluations of 191 parties in 28 EU member states. Results show that the traditional expectation that government parties silence EU issues does not hold anymore; instead, the average EU salience of government and opposition parties is similar on the national level. The strongest predictors for a party’s decision to campaign on EU issues are the co-orientation towards the campaign agendas of competing parties, and party’s EU position.
... Fridays for Future is an indicator that climate change has become politicized in the sense that conflicts in this policy field are becoming more intense and visible (Schattschneider 1960;Hutter and Grande 2014). This implies that climate is gaining in salience with more actors being involved, more polarization in viewpoints, and more alternatives being developed (for a discussion of these elements of politicization, see Grande, Schwarzbözl, and Fatke 2019;Hoeglinger 2016). ...
The idea of a green deal transforming industrialized societies’ climate policies in a sustainable manner has become highly popular in various countries. The study takes up this notion focusing on climate policy initiatives in Canada and the EU, raising three interrelated issues: (i) on a descriptive level, the study asks where we stand and what has so far been achieved regarding climate policy; (ii) analytically, the study provides a theoretical explanation of why progress has been slow in the EU and hardly visible in Canada, making use of the concept of carbon democracy; (iii) on a prescriptive level, the study explores what will be needed to make a green deal successful, arguing that one has to accept that a green deal is a deeply political project that will create winners and losers and that not all losers can be compensated under the label of a “just transition”. The argument advanced is that the EU and Canada represent a form of carbon democracy in which the extensive use of carbon laid the foundation for establishing democratic institutions and strongly shaped them. The paper shows that the extensive influence of carbon-related activities not only empowers specific non-state agents but is rather deeply enmeshed in the societal and political genome of both regions’ polities. The claim that follows is that climate politics in Canada and the EU will have to be deeply transformative and therefore disruptive in order to be successful.
... Different strands of literature argue that European issues and conflicts over Europe have taken on more importance over time. The end of the 'permissive consensus' (Lindberg and Scheingold, 1970) has led to a politicization of European issues (De Wilde, 2011;Hoeglinger, 2016;Hutter et al., 2016;Hutter and Grande, 2014;Statham and Trenz, 2013). This increasing scholarly work on the politicization of Europe has contributed to an important degree to the recent 'politics turn' in European studies . ...
Less researched than the second-order character of elections to the European Parliament (EP) is the ‘Europeanness’ of European elections and its implications for voter participation in these elections. This article aims to fill this gap by studying the Europeanness of the public debate in the run-up to the 2019 EP elections and the mobilizing power of European issues in these electoral contests. In doing this, we draw on a new data set covering intriguing aspects of the 2019 EP elections. The findings of the empirical analysis of media and survey data indicate that the elections to the EP were more European contests than ever before in the history of these elections – yet this is not true in the same way for all of the countries under consideration. Moreover, the Europeanness of electorates, measured as genuine orientations towards EU politics, matters for electoral participation and thus has the power to mobilize citizens. Nonetheless, national factors still play an important role in these elections. These findings are insightful for the future assessment of EP elections and the scholarly debate over multi-level electoral politics in Europe.
... Increasing opportunities for transnational exchange can be viewed as a catalyst for integration (Stone Sweet and Sandholtz, 1997). However, freedom of movement is becoming increasingly politicized and developing into the 'twin issue' of European integration (Hoeglinger, 2016). Accordingly, the public debate in the UK was heavily influenced by EU immigration (Goodwin and Milazzo, 2017;Kentmen-Cin and Erisen, 2017). ...
Which member states could leave the European Union in the years ahead? To answer this question, I develop the ‘EU Exit Index’ measuring the exit propensities of all European Union member states. The index highlights that the United Kingdom was an outlier and uniquely positioned to leave the European Union. While all other states are far behind the United Kingdom, the index still reveals substantial variation among them. Moreover, the index allows monitoring the development of exit propensities over time. It shows that the European Union is in better shape today than before the Brexit referendum and that, currently, no further exits are on the horizon. Still, this could change in the future and the EU Exit Index provides systematic and reproducible measurements to track this development.
... Today's political reality of populist movements, geopolitical competition and disinformation has inspired an emerging scholarship on politicization in EU external policy (Costa, 2018;Moerland and Weinhardt, 2020;Voltolini, 2020;Hackenesch et al., 2021). These follow a broader stream of publications that have produced rich findings on politicization in relation to European integration in general (de Wilde, 2011;Hutter and Grande, 2014;Grande and Hutter, 2016), the effects of domestic elections (Hoeglinger, 2016), or the role of the political leadership in EU member states (de Wilde et al., 2016). These contributions inform the scholarly debate on (f )actors enabling politicization processes, and enrich our understanding about the relevance of the concept to European studies. ...
This article explores the empirical relevance of researching outside‐in politicization processes in European studies. To this end, it examines to what extent and how civil society organizations (CSOs) have contributed to the politicization of EU policies towards Western Africa in two cases: the negotiation of Economic Partnership Agreements and the EU's engagement with the G5 Sahel. CSOs were strongly engaged in the trade negotiations, while they were largely excluded from the G5 Sahel process. In both cases this was due to CSOs' own initiatives, or the absence thereof, with these strongly linked to being either invited or discouraged by official actors. The article argues that authority transfer and the domestic context – including state fragility and state–society relations – are relevant to explaining the (non‐)involvement of CSOs in outside‐in politicization.
... European affairs have become more salient, are scrutinised by ever wider audiences, and polarise public and political opinion (De Wilde et al. 2016: 4). The politicisation of 'Europe' is reflected, in particular, in rising levels of both visibility and contestation -in public opinion, elections and referendums, in party manifestos and political discourse (e.g., Hobolt 2016;Hoeglinger 2016). As Hooghe and Marks (2009) succinctly put it, the 'permissive consensus' of the first decades of European integration has given way to a 'constraining dissensus'. ...
The European Union (EU) has become increasingly visible and contested over the past decades. Several studies have shown that domestic pressure has made the EU's ‘electorally connected’ institutions more responsive. Yet, we still know little about how politicisation has affected the Union's non‐majoritarian institutions. We address this question by focusing on agenda‐setting, and ask whether and how domestic politics influences the prioritisation of legislative proposals by the European Commission. We argue that the Commission, as both a policy‐seeker and a survival‐driven bureaucracy, will respond to domestic issue salience and Euroscepticism, at party, mass and electoral level, through targeted performance and through aggregate restraint. Building on new data on the prioritisation of legislative proposals under the ordinary legislative procedure (1999‐2019), our analysis shows that the Commission's choice to prioritise is responsive to the salience of policy issues for Europe's citizens. By contrast, our evidence suggests that governing parties’ issue salience does not drive, and Euroscepticism does not constrain, the Commission's priority‐setting. Our findings contribute to the literature on multi‐level politics, shedding new light on the strategic responses of non‐majoritarian institutions to the domestic politicisation of ‘Europe’. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
... Zürn (2019, 978) suggests that it can be generally defined as 'moving something into the realm of public choice', while Grande (2014, 1003) define politicisation 'as an expansion of the scope of conflict within the political system.' In operational terms, a consensus is emerging regarding the components of what we mean by the term 'politicisation' (e.g. de Wilde, Leupold, and Schmidtke 2016;Hoeglinger 2016;Hutter and Grande 2014;Rauh 2016;Statham and Trenz 2013). These concepts have mainly been used in the study of the politicisation of European integration, but analogous concepts are also increasingly used in the study of the politicisation of immigration (see Van der Brug et al. 2016;Grande, Schwarzbörzl, and Fatke 2018). ...
The article examines the politicisation of immigration in Europe during the so-called migration crisis. Based on original media data, it traces politicisation during national election campaigns in 15 countries from the 2000s up to 2018. The study covers Northwestern (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Switzerland), Central-Eastern (Hungary, Poland, Latvia, and Romania), and Southern Europe (Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain). We proceed in three interrelated steps. First, we show that the migration crisis has accentuated long-term trends in the politicisation of immigration. The issue has been particularly salient and polarised in Northwestern Europe but also in the latest Italian, Hungarian, and Polish campaigns. Second, radical right parties are still the driving forces of politicisation. The results underscore that the radical right not only directly contributes to the politicisation of immigration but triggers other parties to emphasize the issue, too. Third, we observe a declining ‘marginal return’ of the migration crisis on the electoral support of the radical right, and we confirm previous studies by showing that an accommodating strategy by the centre-right contributes to the radical right’s success, provided the centre-right attributes increasing attention to immigration.
... The onset of the Eurozone crisis, seen as a further moment for EU politicisation at the domestic level Kriesi 2019a, 2019b;Hooghe and Marks 2018;Hoeglinger 2016;Grande and Hutter 2016;De Vries, 2018, Gross andSchafer, 2020), gave rise to a lot more research on the consequences of "Europe" for political behaviour. The Eurozone crisis brought home to citizens the implications of the EMU (Economic and Monetary Union), both in terms of the locus of economic decision-making, but also in terms of the obligations of both debtor and creditor countries within it. ...
The symposium aims to analyse the politicisation of the European issue following the onset of the Eurozone crisis, in particular its impact on individual attitudes and voting both at the national and supranational level. By way of an introduction, we address the state of the art on the importance of the Eurozone crisis for EU politicisation, as well as outlining each article and its contribution. While our authors may sometimes focus on different dependent variables, they all speak to the question of whether the Great Recession made a lasting difference, and whether EU politicisation matters. Most articles are longitudinal, and test for changes due to the crisis (Dassonneville, Lewis- Beck and Jabbour; Ruiz-Rufino; Talving and Vasilopolou; Jurado and Navarrete). But preoccupation with the Great Recession is also present in the articles assessing the political learning that unfolded from it (Ruiz-Rufino), or the ones which investigate whether EU effects can be detected during the post-crisis years (Talving and Vasilopolou; Lobo and Pannico; Heyne and Lobo). Despite the diversity of approaches, and certain differences in findings, each article contributes to a major debate ongoing in the literature, especially three key debates which have arisen: the crisis’ impact on European party systems, economic voting, and the degree of legitimacy of democratic systems.
l processo di integrazione europea è sempre più al centro del dibattito pubblico, ai sostenitori dell'UE si contrappongono gli euroscettici e sono inoltre presenti posizioni miste. In che misura l'UE, oltre a rappresentare un tema molto dibattuto, è anche al cuore dei processi di politicizzazione? Nel volume, approfondiamo la questione guardando sia al versante della domanda (cittadini) sia a quello dell'offerta politica (partiti). In particolare, la nostra analisi considera l'enfasi che i partiti pongono sul tema, le posizioni che essi assumono e se la vicinanza di posizioni sull'UE tra elettori e partiti è correlata alle scelte di voto. Attraverso l'uso di una molteplicità di dati, la nostra analisi restituisce chiare evidenze a sostegno della politicizzazione dell'UE, nel tempo diventata una questione più controversa e saliente, così come la trattazione che ne hanno fatto i partiti è risultata più decisa ed enfatica, oltre che polarizzante. L'analisi dei dati elettorali suggerisce che la congruenza di posizioni elettori-partiti sull'UE sia diventata, nel tempo, sempre più importante per spiegare i comportamenti di voto dei cittadini. Questi risultati, che nel volume documentiamo a livello comparato per i paesi dell'UE, trovano un forte riscontro anche nel caso italiano, dove il prima-to dei partiti euroscettici nella politicizzazione dell'UE appare essersi saldato con la mobilitazione a livello elettorale.
This article makes the case for conceptualisation of attitudes towards the EU as interpretative ‘frames’, to be employed as analytical tools for comparison within and between European countries. At present, this move is all the more necessary. In fact, multiple asymmetrical crises and the entrenchment of ‘differentiated integration’ have compounded the contested, open-ended nature of European integration; in parallel, EU studies have increasingly acknowledged the context dependence, heterogeneity and ambivalence of such attitudes, moving beyond the presumption of stable support or opposition. The article leverages a variety of extant works and the empirical outcomes of a deductive-cum-inductive research endeavour to craft a comprehensive inventory of 16 interpretative frames. Then, it highlights a fundamental application, discussing practices that enable the construction of a frame-based approach to mass-elite congruence on European integration. Further suggested developments entail the study of Euroscepticism, national ‘issue cultures’ and ‘issue fields’, and mass-level attitudes towards the EU.
A vital political opposition is one of the cornerstones of democracy, yet we know surprisingly little about the conditions that shape it. In this paper, we offer a comprehensive assessment of the drivers of parliamentary opposition in European Union (EU) politics in five countries: Denmark; Germany; Ireland; Sweden; and the United Kingdom. Based on an extensive hand-coded data set of 7,520 statements made by members of parliament (MPs) during both plenary sessions and deliberations during European Affairs Committee (EAC) meetings, we examine how institutions and party characteristics shape two types of oppositional behaviour: the expression of critique and the presentation of alternatives. We find that both factors are important for understanding to what extent, and how, opposition is voiced in national parliaments. Oversight institutions’ strength and a party’s degree of Euroscepticism jointly function as significant determinants of the likelihood that MPs will express opposition in the form of critique. However, when it comes to the likelihood of offering alternatives, oversight institutions’ strength fails to explain variations in the share of alternatives, while degree of Euroscepticism remains a significant predictor.
Despite a rich body of literature on politicisation, knowledge of this process and its driving forces remains limited. Specifically, little empirical analysis has been carried out to assess the impact of focusing events on politicisation within global and seemingly technical venues of policy‐making. Building on existing studies, I conceptualise politicisation as a combination of three components: (1) issue salience, (2) actor expansion and (3) actor diversity. I test the impact of focusing events on the politicisation of one of the most pressing global policy issues of our age: internet regulation, specifically regarding global data protection and internet privacy rules. I use a systematic analysis of news media coverage over a 20‐year period, resulting in an original dataset of 2,100 news articles. Controlling for different factors, my findings reveal that focusing events do contribute to politicisation in technical venues, in particular regarding the actors involved in debates. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
This chapter focuses on parties belonging to the populist right-wing I&D family, and specifically those who were in national government at the time of the campaign. While these parties did express Eurosceptic sympathies, they did not focus their campaign messaging on the EU having now taken office; in fact, these politicians appeared more preoccupied than might have been expected with domestic politics.
In the past, the European Union seems to have been able to tame Euroscepticism through regional 'convergence' funding. After the Eastern enlargement of the Union, however, this relationship needs to be put to the test. Not only have the new member states become the main recipients of EU funding, Eastern Europe has also changed from once being the most integration-friendly region to displaying the most integration-hostile attitudes in the EU. Motivated by this empirical puzzle, we revisit the relationship between structural 'convergence' funding and Euroscepticism and ask where-if at all-is the EU's convergence spending still able to tame Euroscepticism. Most surprisingly, correlation analyses reveal that between 2006 and 2018 larger regional subsidies go along with increasing opposition to EU integration. We can rebut this counterintuitive finding by a Diff-in-Diff approach that reveals an increasing Euroscepticism in Eastern European regions between 2006 and 2014. Nevertheless, also these more advanced models fail to establish a positive relationship between regional funding eligibility and pro-integrationist attitudes. Finally, fuzzy RDD models exploit the funding assignment rule and corroborate that the EU is no longer able to pacify integration-critical regions by their simply increasing 'convergence' funding. Nevertheless, the EU has won support in Eastern Europe where EU investments are perceived (positively). In designing a strategy to win back support for EU integration, Brussels does not need more fiscal capacity but rather has to design 'convergence' funding that is visible as well as clearly attributable to its donor.
Over the last decades, EU integration has become the subject of increased public discussion, debate, and contestation, which is explained through different lenses in EU studies by liberal intergovernmentalists and post-functionalists. This chapter is a contribution to this debate as it seeks to shed light on patterns of politicisation over EU integration in the European public spheres. Through the analysis of 16 newspapers from seven Eastern (Hungary, Poland, Romania) and Western (Belgium, France, Germany, and Spain) EU member states, this chapter analyses the EU media coverage in the context of the 2019 European elections with a focus on salience, polarisation, and lines of conflict over EU integration. Scrutinising a set of 1127 articles, the analysis captures six lines of tensions—intergovernmental conflict, national vs. supranational, government vs. opposition, supporters of democracy vs. threats to democracy, supporters of immigration vs. anti-immigration, and integration vs. disintegration—whose intensity varies not only in the Eastern and Western newspapers, but also among them. While the conflicts opposing integration vs. disintegration and democracy vs. ‘illiberalism’ are common to the Eastern and Western newspapers analysed, although framed differently, the four other lines of conflict seem to be specific to the EU coverage in the Eastern newspapers. The article is conceived as an empirical test to theoretically bridge the concept of politicisation to the EU's theories of integration and types of conflict over European integration.
The process of European integration, through institutions such as the European Union, the Eurozone, or Schengen, implies a shift in political decision-making away from the national governments and towards international institutions. This gradual shift in the balance of power, furthermore, is increasingly debated by citizens. As a result, European integration might lead to an erosion of satisfaction with democracy in European countries. By means of a longitudinal analysis of the determinants of satisfaction with democracy in European countries, we test this expectation. We find no indication that the shift in the balance of power, and the trend towards more European integration indeed have eroded satisfaction with the functioning of (national) democracy.
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers in the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
That citizens of European Union countries differ in their attitudes regarding Europe is a commonplace of political commentary. Some favor their country’s membership in the EU, others oppose it. Some, while thinking that membership is generally a good thing, feel that steps toward unification have gone far enough – or even too far. Others believe that further steps should be taken.Citizens of EU countries also differ in terms of more traditional political orientations – attitudes to the proper role of government in society, welfare provision, and other matters which have increasingly over the past half-century come to be subsumed within a single orientation towards government action, generally referred to as the left/right orientation (Lipset 1960; Lijphart 1980; Franklin, Mackie, Valen, et al., 1992).These two orientations are often assumed to be orthogonal, with the newer pro-/anti-EU orientation cutting across the more traditional left/right orientation (see, e.g., Hicks and Lord 1998; Hooghe and Marks 1999). Our own research (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996; van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999; van der Brug, Franklin, and van der Eijk 2000) demonstrates that EU orientation does not currently have much impact on party choice at EU elections. Elections to the European Parliament have been described as “second-order national” elections at which the arena supposedly at issue (the European arena) takes second place to the national arena as a focus for issue and representational concerns (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1984, 1985; Marsh and Franklin 1996); and the national arena is quintessentially one in which left/right orientations dominate.
Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within national public spheres. There is as yet no genuine Europe-wide party system or public debate. This reveals a gap between the normative theoretical assessment of EU politicisation and empirical sociological analysis of this phenomenon. To reconcile this discrepancy, this paper develops three actually-existing trajectories of politicisation: the remote conflict, the international conflict and the domestic conflict. Each trajectory carries unique challenges and opportunities to the democratic legitimacy of the Union. It is argued that the domestic conflict trajectory is most promising from a normative democratic perspective. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily imply a renationalisation of the EU.
What are the consequences of globalization for the structure of political conflicts in Western Europe? How are political conflicts organized and articulated in the twenty-first century? And how does the transformation of territorial boundaries affect the scope and content of political conflicts? This book sets out to answer these questions by analyzing the results of a study of national and European electoral campaigns, protest events and public debates in six West European countries. While the mobilization of the losers of the processes of globalization by new right populist parties is seen to be the driving force of the restructuring of West European politics, the book goes beyond party politics. It attempts to show how the cleavage coalitions that are shaping up under the impact of globalization extend to state actors, interest groups and social movement organizations, and how the new conflicts are framed by the various actors involved.
This paper presents a theoretical framework for analyzing change in party alignments that highlights their underlying logic and dynamic evolution. The framework is based on three analytical concepts - opportunity, motive and means. The opportunity for partisan change increases as party alignments age because aging alignments include a growing proportion of incompletely socialized and weakly aligned citizens. Motive is ever-present because of losing, but rational-calculating politicians need to dislodge the current majority and institute one of their own. And the means of partisan change are provided by powerful new issues that can split the majority party's fragile coalition. It is the dynamic interaction among these three elements that leads to the natural evolution of party alignments.
Both implicit democratic norms and the reconstructions provided by theorists of rational choice suggest that issue voters are more sophisticated--educated, informed, and active in politics--than other voters. But some issues are clearly more difficult than others, and the voters who respond to @'hard@' and @`easy@' issues, respectively, are assumed to differ in kind. We propose the hypothesis that @'`easy-issue@' voters are no more sophisticated than non-issue voters, and this is found to be the case. The findings suggest a reevaluation of the import of rising and falling levels of issue voting and suggest a prominent role for @`easy@' issues in electoral realignments.
How is contestation on European integration structured among national political parties? Are issues arising from European integration assimilated into existing dimensions of domestic contestation? We show that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left/right dimension and party positioning on European integration. However, the most powerful source of variation in party support is the new politics dimension, ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian to Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist.
A new and wide-ranging empirical overview of party policy in 47 modern democracies, including all of the new democracies of Eastern Europe. It updates and radically extends Policy and Party Competition (1992), which established itself as a key mainstream data source for all political scientists exploring the policy positions of political parties. This essential text is divided into three clear parts: Part I introduces the study, themes and methodology Part II deals in depth with the wide range of issues involved in estimating and analyzing the policy positions of key political actors. Part III is the key data section that identifies key policy dimensions across the 47 countries, detailing their party positions and median legislators, and is complemented by graphical representations of each party system. This book is an invaluable reference for all political scientists, particularly those interested in party policy and comparative politics.
In the literature on European integration, politicization as concept is often attributed major importance. This article shows how the literature variously discusses the politicization of European Union (EU) institutions, the politicization of EU decision‐making processes or the politicization of EU issues. Similarly, the literature attributes three different functions to politicization: it functions to crystallize opposing advocacy coalitions, to raise the question of legitimacy and to alter the course of European integration. Despite this diversity, this article argues we are in fact dealing with an encompassing process. To further our understanding of politicization of European integration, politicization as process is defined as an increase in polarization of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards policy formulation within the EU. Furthermore, attention is directed to practices of representative claims‐making in the public sphere through which relationships of delegation and accountability can be altered in discourse.
Why and how do candidates choose the issues on which their campaigns are based? Drawing on a large database of candidate advertisements from the 1998 House and Senate campaigns, extant theories of issue emphasis, which focus on factors such as party ownership and candidate record, are tested here and these theories are expanded by examining in more detail the role of constituency characteristics. Most notably, party ownership's impact is demonstrated to be weak: candidates are more willing to ‘trespass’ or talk about the other party's issues than previous literature has found. Also ‘trespassing’ is shown to be facilitated by framing the other party's issues in certain ways. The results have implications for theories of candidate strategy and for normative questions, such as how much ‘dialogue’ occurs in campaigns.
Preferences over jurisdictional architecture are the product of three irreducible
logics: efficiency, distribution and identity. This article substantiates the
following claims: (a) European integration has become politicized in elections
and referendums; (b) as a result, the preferences of the general public and of
national political parties have become decisive for jurisdictional outcomes; (c)
identity is critical in shaping contestation on Europe.
Can an election campaign be considered a normal time period, or is it a very exceptional episode in the way the media look at political actors and issues? This is the central question of this article. We claim that during campaigns (political) journalists work under different (legal) conditions and are confronted with politicians and parties that are more active than ever, and with a public that pays more attention to who and how politics is presented. This general claim is made concrete in several hypotheses that are tested on the basis of a large dataset of Flemish news broadcasts be-tween 2003 and 2006. Our results confirm that campaign periods strongly influence the amount, style and actors of the (political) news in Belgium (Flanders).
How can we measure and explain the salience of European integration for political parties? Although salience is an extensively used concept within the field of European Union (EU) studies, it suffers from conceptual ambiguity and lacks rigorous empirical investigation. This article sets out to conceptualise and explain the salience of European integration to political parties, by cross-validating three empirical salience measures used in the Comparative Manifesto Project, European Election Study and Marks/Steenbergen Expert survey. The analysis demonstrates that whilst one common dimension underlies the different salience measures, there is no common explanation for variation in salience. There is one exception: when the EU is salient to the party system as a whole, it tends to be salient to each party in the system.
Abstract will be provided by author.
This book uniquely enriches and empowers its readers. It enriches them by giving them the most detailed and extensive data available on the policies and preferences of key democratic actors-parties, governments, and electors in 25 democracies over the post-war period. Estimates are provided for every election and most coalitions of the post-war period and derive from the programmes, manifestos, and platforms of parties and governments themselves. Thus, they form a uniquely authoritative source, recognized as such and provided through the labour of a team of international scholars over 25 years. The book empowers readers by providing these estimates on the website http://manifestoproject.wzb.eu/MPP1. The printed text provides documentation and suggested uses for data, along with much other background information. The changing ideologies and concerns of parties trace general social developments over the post-war period, as well as directly affecting economic policy making. Indispensable for any serious discussion of democratic politics, the book provides necessary information for political scientists, policy analysts, comparativists, sociologists, and economists. A must for every social science library-private as well as academic or public.
This book explains the contrasting strategies and their electoral fortunes of social democratic parties in the major European democracies in the 1970s and 1980s. Going beyond approaches that focus on the influence of class structure and political economic institutions, The Transformation of European Social Democracy analyses the party's competitive situation in the electoral arena, the constraints and opportunities of party organisation, and the role of ideological legacies to explain the strategic choices social democratic parties have made and the electoral results they have achieved. Far from being doomed to decline, social democracy's success depends on its ability to transform its political message and to construct new electoral coalitions.
This study focuses on the historical configuration of territorial borders and functional boundaries of the European nation states, and interprets integration as a process of transcendence, redefinition, and shift of those same boundaries that alters the nature of the nation states’ domestic political structures. The core of the argument concerns the relationship between the institutional design of the new Brussels centre, the boundary redefinitions that result from its political production, and the consequences of both these processes on the established national and emerging European political structures. The EU is interpreted through three key conceptual tools: ‘centre formation’, ‘system building’, and ‘political structuring’. The ‘centre formation’ — with limited administrative and fiscal capabilities and strong regulatory and judicial capabilities — is not accompanied by ‘system building’ in the field of cultural integration, social sharing institutions, and participation rights, that is, by institutions forcing its components to stay within it beyond the mere instrumental calculations. Given that for any new centre a balance must exist between its system building capacity and the scope and reach of its political production, the argument is that the ambitious political production of the EU is clearly out of balance with its weak system building capacity. As far as the ‘political structuring’ is concerned, this work argues that the institutional design of the Union and its weak system building militate to date against any stable form of political structuring for its representative actors, while its growing political production tends to undermine national mechanisms of political representation and legitimation. Under these conditions, any institutional democratization without political structuring may turn into facade electioneering, at best, or dangerous experiments, at worst. In the view of classical sociology — that takes the existence of a certain overlap between social identities, political boundaries, and social practices as a precondition for establishing political agency and a ‘rational’ political order — the EU is both a source of problems but also a possible solution to them. It can be seen as a project for regaining some degree of coherence between extended social practices, social identities, solidarity ties, and rules of deliberation at the European level. Most of the ideas expressed in this book show how problematic this project is believed to be.
Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are only now becoming apparent. The editors of this 2004 volume, Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, have brought together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict that are arising in the European Union. Using diverse sources of data, and examining a range of actors, including citizens, political parties, members of the European Parliament, social movements, and interest groups, the authors of this volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is indeed rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years. This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of political conflict in the European Union.
In A Community of Europeans?, a thoughtful observer of the ongoing project of European integration evaluates the state of the art about European identity and European public spheres. Thomas Risse argues that integration has had profound and long-term effects on the citizens of EU countries, most of whom now have at least a secondary "European identity" to complement their national identities. Risse also claims that we can see the gradual emergence of transnational European communities of communication. Exploring the outlines of this European identity and of the communicative spaces, Risse sheds light on some pressing questions: What do "Europe" and "the EU" mean in the various public debates? How do European identities and transnational public spheres affect policymaking in the EU? And how do they matter in discussions about enlargement, particularly Turkish accession to the EU? What will be the consequences of the growing contestation and politicization of European affairs for European democracy? This focus on identity allows Risse to address the "democratic deficit" of the EU, the disparity between the level of decision making over increasingly relevant issues for peoples' lives (at the EU) and the level where politics plays itself out-in the member states. He argues that the EU's democratic deficit can only be tackled through politicization and that "debating Europe" might prove the only way to defend modern and cosmopolitan Europe against the increasingly forceful voices of Euroskepticism.
This book offers a comprehensive treatment of the timely question of the politicization of European integration. It shows how this issue's complex linkages with traditional political divides pose a tough challenge to politicians and lead to bitter framing contests about its actual meaning.
In the era following the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has been transformed into a multilevel polity in which European issues have become important not only for national governments, but also for citizens, political parties, interest groups, and social movements. How is conflict over European integration structured? This is the question that this book addresses. The question of contestation over European integration has two related components. First, how do domestic and European political actors conceive the basic alternatives? Can debates over European integration, despite their complexity, be reduced to a relatively small number of dimensions? Does contestation over European integration resolve itself into a single underlying dimension, or does it involve two or more separate dimensions? Second, how is contestation over European integration related, if at all, to the issues that have characterized political life in Western Europe over the past century or more? In particular, how is contestation over European integration related to the left/right divide concerning the role of the state and equality vs. economic freedom? These topics were first raised by neofunctionalists writing in the early days of European integration. Ernst Haas paid close attention to the domestic sources of opposition and support for European integration in his classic study, The Uniting of Europe, published in 1958. However, most scholars continued to view European integration as the result of foreign policies conducted by government elites acting on a “permissive consensus” (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970).
Having illustrated how party competition can take the form of selective emphasis on issues, as demonstrated by the 1929 General Election in Britain, the author looks at the two alternative views of competition, namely selective emphases versus opposing preferences. British manifestos and American platforms are analysed in terms of selective emphases on issues, and the chapter concludes by assessing the effects of selective emphases on party victory and defeat, and consequently on party strategy.-J.Sheail
The ongoing process of integration in Europe has fundamentally altered the political environment in which the political parties of the EU member states find themselves. European integration has produced new political issues, which cannot always be easily accommodated into existing cleavage structures, as the preceding chapters reveal. It has also changed the political opportunity structure – parties may play these new issues up or they may play them down. In this chapter, we analyze why some national political parties have stressed European integration, while others have refrained from doing so. An analysis of the salience of European integration at the party level is important for several reasons. First, it speaks directly to the topic of contestation. A prerequisite for contestation is that political actors are willing to debate an issue – there is a willingness to give the issue a modicum of salience. To what extent do political parties show such willingness? Second, salience is also critical for understanding representation in the EU. Van der Eijk and Franklin (1996; this volume; see also Reif and Schmitt 1980) have observed that European elections are rarely about the scope and nature of integration, even though at the level of the electorate a contestation potential exists. This may be a contributing factor to the so-called democratic deficit of the EU. The lack of European content in European elections may be due to an unwillingness or inability of parties to raise integration above a critical salience threshold.
This book examines how mass media debates have contributed to the politicization of the European Union. The public controversies over the EU’s attempted Constitution-making (and its failure) sowed the seeds for a process of politicization that has advanced ever since: an increasing visibility for the EU in mass-mediated public debates that is combined with a growing public contestation over Europe within national politics. The book presents an original systematic study of the emerging field of political discourse carried by the mass media in France, Germany and Britain to examine the performance of Europe’s public sphere. Whilst the EU’s increasing politicization can be seen as beneficial to European democracy, potentially ‘normalizing’ the EU-level within national politics, the same developments can also be a threat to democracy, leading to populist and xenophobic responses and a decline in political trust. Such discussions are key to understanding the EU’s legitimacy and how its democratic politics can work in an era of mediated politics.
Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peacetime over the past half-century. However, the ideological conflicts emerging from this development are only now becoming apparent. This collection brings together an authoritative group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict arising in the European Union. The contributors to the volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years.
Domestic opportunity structures and political actors’ positions are widely regarded as the most important explanatory factors for EU politicisation. The euro crisis, however, has revealed cleavages across rather than within countries, suggesting structural factors as a potential explanation for politicisation. Based on the political economy literature on Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, this contribution develops a structural approach to politicisation with respect to countries’ power and variety of capitalism. Using a content and claims analysis of business papers in Germany, France, Austria and Ireland before and during the crisis, the findings reveal a differentiated pattern of politicisation. While an expansion of actors indicates that EMU became more politicised during the crisis, polarisation remained low within countries. Countries’ variety of capitalism and their perceived power in the EU largely explain the substance and objects of politicisation. The findings encourage further research considering structural explanations for differentiated politicisation in less elite-centred settings of politicisation.
The politicisation of European governance has become an important subject in debates about the institutional design, day-to-day decision-making and democratic legitimacy of the European Union. This special issue takes stock of this development of politicisation research, including the theoretical development as well as the rapidly expanding body of empirical evidence. It synergises the various perspectives on politicisation of European governance, building on a common understanding of politicisation as a three-dimensional process involving increasing salience, polarisation of opinion and the expansion of actors and audiences involved in EU issues. The introduction outlines the central theoretical and conceptual questions concerning the politicisation of European governance and provides a guiding framework for the contributions to this special issue. The contributions document that a differentiated Europe leads to differentiated politicisation across times, countries and settings. The differentiated patterns, particularly across countries, present profound challenges to the future trajectory of European integration and its democratic legitimacy.
Theory: This paper develops and applies an issue ownership theory of voting that emphasizes the role of campaigns in setting the criteria for voters to choose between candidates. It expects candidates to emphasize issues on which they are advantaged and their opponents are less well regarded. It explains the structural factors and party system variables which lead candidates to differentially emphasize issues. It invokes theories of priming and framing to explain the electorate's response. Hypotheses: Issue emphases are specific to candidates; voters support candidates with a party and performance based reputation for greater competence on handling the issues about which the voter is concerned. Aggregate election outcomes and individual votes follow the problem agenda. Method: Content analysis of news reports, open-ended voter reports of important problems, and the vote are analyzed with graphic displays and logistic regression analysis for presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. Results: Candidates do have distinctive patterns of problem emphases in their campaigns; election outcomes do follow the problem concerns of voters; the individual vote is significantly influenced by these problem concerns above and beyond the effects of the standard predictors.
Recent studies have started to use media data to measure party positions and issue salience. The aim of this article is to compare and cross-validate this alternative approach with the more commonly used party manifestos, expert judgments and mass surveys. To this purpose, we present two methods to generate indicators of party positions and issue salience from media coverage: the core sentence approach and political claims analysis. Our cross-validation shows that with regard to party positions, indicators derived from the media converge with traditionally used measurements from party manifestos, mass surveys and expert judgments, but that salience indicators measure different underlying constructs. We conclude with a discussion of specific research questions for which media data offer potential advantages over more established methods.
How does the ideological profile of a political party affect its support or opposition to European integration? The authors investigate this question with a new expert data set on party positioning on European integration covering 171 political parties in 23 countries. The authors’ findings are (a) that basic structures of party competition in the East and West are fundamentally and explicably different and (b) that although the positions that parties in the East and West take on European integration are substantively different, they share a single underlying causality.
This study asks how and to what extent political parties in six West European countries - Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK - have addressed the process of European integration in national election campaigns since the 1970s. Based on a content analysis of newspaper data, the results show that Eurosceptic mobilization in national election campaigns has become most pronounced in countries where the public have always been rather apprehensive about European integration. In line with the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, in Switzerland and the UK mobilization around European integration is primarily driven by conservatives and/or the new populist right. In countries where the process of European integration is politically less salient, conservatives and/or the new populist right have been less Eurosceptic and their mobilization efforts have been more limited. While providing mixed support for the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, the study provides scant support for the received wisdom that Euroscepticism among political parties is essentially dictated by ‘opposition politics’.
A brief overview of the changing format and mechanics of national party systems suggests that the direct impact of European integration has been severely limited. Although the national party systems as constituted within the European electoral arena may show signs of such an impact, this has as yet failed to spill over into the strictly domestic arena. Two major reasons are suggested to account for this seeming imperviousness of the national party systems. First, the absence of an arena in which parties may compete at European level for executive office, an absence which thereby hinders the development of a European party system as such. Second, the misplaced division of competences associated with the national and European electoral arenas, whereby issues concerning the European political system itself are largely excluded from the national political arena to which they properly belong. The study concludes by suggesting that it is through the indirect process of depoliticisation that Europe may exert its greatest impact on national party systems.
Ronald Inglehart has argued that, while most of the major political parties in Western countries tend to be aligned along a social class-based axis, support for new political movements and new political parties largely reflects the tension between materialist and postmaterialist goals and values. This has presented something of a dilemma to the traditional parties, and helps account for the decline of social-class voting. Scott Flanagan takes issue with Inglehart's interpretation in several particulars. Although their views converge in many respects, Flanagan urges conceptual reorientations and adumbrates a different interpretation of post-World War II political development in Europe and Japan.
The thesis of this original and provocative book is that representative government should be understood as a combination of democratic and undemocratic, aristocratic elements. Professor Manin challenges the conventional view that representative democracy is no more than an indirect form of government by the people, in which citizens elect representatives only because they cannot assemble and govern in person. The argument is developed by examining the historical moments when the present institutional arrangements were chosen from among the then available alternatives. Professor Manin reminds us that while today representative institutions and democracy appear as virtually indistinguishable, when representative government was first established in Europe and America, it was designed in opposition to democracy proper. Drawing on the procedures used in earlier republican systems, from classical Athens to Renaissance Florence, in order to highlight the alternatives that were forsaken, Manin brings to the fore the generally overlooked results of representative mechanisms. These include the elitist aspect of elections and the non-binding character of campaign promises.
Do attitudes towards European integration influence vote choice in national elections — a phenomenon I refer to as European Union (EU) issue voting? Evidence concerning EU issue voting is thus far mixed. Some scholars conclude that an electoral connection exists between European and national politics, whereas others claim that European integration has had very few observable effects on national elections. A resolution emerges when the conditional nature of EU issue voting is acknowledged. Specifically, EU issue voting is more likely to occur in elections in which both the extent of partisan conflict over European integration and the degree of EU issue salience among voters are high. Using a conditional logit model, I illustrate the conditional nature of EU issue voting by comparing UK, Danish, Dutch and German elections between 1992 and 2002.
This paper compares legislative dynamics under all procedures in which the Council of Ministers votes by qualified majority (QMV). We make five major points. First, the EU governments have sought to reduce the democratic deficit by increasing the powers of the European Parliament since 1987, whereas they have lessened the legislative influence of the Commission. Under the Amsterdam treaty's version of the codecision procedure, the Parliament is a coequal legislator with the Council, whereas the Commission's influence is likely to be more informal than formal. Second, as long as the Parliament acts as a pro-integration entrepreneur, policy outcomes under consultation, cooperation and the new codecision will be more integrationist than the QMV-pivot in the Council prefers. Third, the pace of European integration may slow down if MEPs become more responsive to the demands of their constituents. Fourth, the EU is evolving into a bicameral legislature with a heavy status quo bias. Not only does the Council use QMV but absolute majority voting requirements and high levels of absenteeism create a de facto supermajority threshold for Parliamentary decisions. Finally, if the differences between the Council and the Parliament concern regulation issues on a traditional left-right axis, the Commission is more likely to be the ally of the Council than the Parliament.
This article analyses how political parties frame European integration, and gauges the consistency of their argumentation. Over the course of investigation, one can see how actors' positions are justified, and how the European Union is perceived (i.e., what forces give rise to Euroscepticism and Europeanism). It is argued here that the parties' framing of issues depends on the interests they traditionally defend at the national level, their general positions on European integration, and whether or not they belong to the established political actors in their respective countries. The coding approach enables the relation of frames to actors and positions, moving beyond the techniques employed by existing studies that analyse the media presentation of European integration. Sophisticated frame categorisations are provided to capture the complex structure of argumentation, going beyond a simple dichotomy of economic and cultural frames. Relying on a large and original media dataset covering the period 2004–2006, six Western European countries are investigated.
Recently the study of the relationship between the media and the political agenda has received growing attention of both media and political science scholars. However, these research efforts have not led to a general discussion or a real theory on the media's political agenda setting power. This article first analytically confronts the often contradictory results of the available evidence. Then, it sketches the broad outline of a preliminary theory. Political agenda setting by the media is contingent upon a number of conditions. The input variables of the model are the kind of issues covered, the specific media outlet, and the sort of coverage. Political context variables, the features of the political actors at stake, are at the heart of the model. The model proposes five sorts of output ranging from no political adoption to fast substantial adoption of media issues.
Following the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, executives of European Union (EU) Member States and the European Commission tried to take European integration as a political issue as much off the agenda as possible and limit involvement of citizens in EU decision‐making. This article assesses the viability of this attempt to combat politicization of European integration and comes to the conclusion that it is unlikely to succeed in the long run. Politicization, it is argued, is a direct consequence of the increasing authority of the EU. The executive response to reverse this trend, however, does not address its cause, but rather the intermediating factors in the form of political opportunity structure. Since the cause of politicization remains intact and intermediating factors are unlikely to be controlled by executives, this attempt to reverse politicization is not viable.
With the recent acceleration of the integration process of the European Union there has been a rise in political parties expressing either scepticism or outright criticism of the nature of the integration process. Using a four–fold differentiation between single issue, protest, established parties and factions within parties, the first part of the article presents an overview of Euroscepticism within EU member states and Norway. This reveals the diversity of sources of Euroscepticism both in ideology and in the types of parties that are Eurosceptical but with a preponderance of protest parties taking Eurosceptical positions. The second part of the article is an attempt to map Euroscepticism in West European party systems through a consideration of ideology and party position in the party system. The conclusions are that Euroscepticism is mainly limited to parties on the periphery of their party system and is often there used as an issue that differentiates those parties from the more established parties which are only likely to express Euroscepticism through factions. Party based Euroscepticism is therefore both largely dependent on domestic contextual factors and a useful issue to map emergent domestic political constellations.
Hooghe and Marks recently introduced a new research agenda for the study of European integration focusing on politicisation, that is, the inclusion of mass public attitudes in the politics of European integration. The overall aim of this article is to respond to this new research agenda. Unlike the existing literature, which focuses on Euro-sceptical extreme left or right-wing parties, the article argues that the explanation for politicisation or the lack of it should be found in the incentives the issue offers for mainstream political parties. Denmark serves as a crucial case study to show the limitations of the existing literature and the need to focus on the incentives of mainstream political parties. Empirically, the article argues that expectations about the impending politicisation of European integration are misplaced. The giant is fast asleep because those who could wake it up generally have no incentive to do so and those who have an incentive cannot.
Inspired by the agenda-setting literature, this article outlines a model of issue competition focusing on the interaction between government and opposition parties through the party-system agenda. Unlike previous studies of issue competition, the model makes it possible to answer questions such as why some parties have greater success than others in forcing other parties to address unpleasant issues. One of the central implications of the model is that opposition parties are freer to focus continually on issues that are advantageous to themselves, whereas government parties more often are forced to respond to issues brought up on the party-system agenda. Using data on issue competition in Denmark covering 25 years and 23 issue categories, the issue competition model is evaluated and finds strong support in a set of cross-sectional time-series analyses.
This article starts from the assumption that the current process of globalization or denationalization leads to the formation of a new structural conflict in Western European countries, opposing those who benefit from this process against those who tend to lose in the course of the events. The structural opposition between globalization ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ is expected to constitute potentials for political mobilization within national political contexts, the mobilization of which is expected to give rise to two intimately related dynamics: the transformation of the basic structure of the national political space and the strategic repositioning of the political parties within the transforming space. The article presents several hypotheses with regard to these two dynamics and tests them empirically on the basis of new data concerning the supply side of electoral politics from six Western European countries (Austria, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland). The results indicate that in all the countries, the new cleavage has become embedded into existing two-dimensional national political spaces, that the meaning of the original dimensions has been transformed, and that the configuration of the main parties has become triangular even in a country like France.
Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collected data on election campaigns. The authors argue that, as a result of structural transformations and the strategic repositioning of political parties, Europe has observed the emergence of a tripolar configuration of political power, comprising the left, the moderate right, and the new populist right. They suggest that, through an emphasis on cultural issues such as mass immigration and resistance to European integration, the traditional focus of political debate - the economy - has been downplayed or reinterpreted in terms of this new political cleavage. This new analysis of Western European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.
Winner of the American Political Science Association's 1996 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award. The rise of new political competitors on the radical right is a central feature of many contemporary European party systems. The first study of its kind based on a wide array of comparative survey data, The Radical Right in Western Europe: A Comparative Analysis provides a unifying framework to explain why rightist parties are electorally powerful in some countries but not in others. The book argues that changes in social structure and the economy do not by themselves adequately explain the success of extremist parties. Instead we must look to the competitive struggles among parties, their internal organizational patterns, and their long-term ideological traditions to understand the principles governing their success. Radical right authoritarian parties tend to emerge when moderate parties converge toward the median voter. But the success of these parties depends on the strategy employed by the right-wing political actors. Herbert Kitschelt's in-depth analysis, based on the experiences of rightist parties in Austria, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, and Britain, reveals that the broadest appeal is enjoyed by parties that couple a fierce commitment to free markets with authoritarian, ethnocentric--or even racist--messages. The author also shows how a country's particular political constituency or its intellectual and organizational legacies may allow right-wing parties to diverge from these norms and still find electoral success. The book concludes by exploring the interaction between the development of the welfare state, cultural pluralization through immigrants, and the growth of the extreme right. Herbert Kitschelt is Professor of Political Science at both Duke University and Humboldt University, Berlin. Anthony McGann is a Ph.D. candidate in political science at Duke University.