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Regional redistribution and Eurosceptic voting
Abstract
Anticipating the competitive disadvantage of economically weak regions in an integrated European single market, the European Union (EU) redistributes money to alleviate economic inequalities and increase cohesion. However, the amount of European redistribution is very moderate and the recent years have shown that Eurosceptic parties gain ground, especially in economically weak areas. So is Eurosceptic voting related to an insufficient compensation of the losers of EU integration? Combining European Social Survey data with information on regional funding for 123 EU regions, I demonstrate that the probability of a Eurosceptic vote is highest under insufficient compensation. Insufficient compensation occurs among middle income regions that are cut-off from the bulk of funding due to the regional policies’ targeted approach. Moreover, some of the poorest regions miss out as well, as the more developed areas among the poor are favored in funds allocation. A taming effect of funding on Eurosceptic voting is therefore restricted to the more prosperous regions in Europe’s lagging areas.
... Rather, we point to the low visibility of CP and, consequently, to citizens' limited awareness of its existence. 1 Despite the presence of European programmes aimed at benefiting (vulnerable) citizens, the EU remains largely invisible to them, also because of the limited reach of regional funding (Schraff, 2019). Therefore, it misses out on a major source of socio-political stabilisation and selflegitimation. ...
... On the other hand, Verhaegen et al. (2014) observed a smaller probability that respondents support European integration in Member States that receive more Structural Funds. Recently, Schraff (2019) showed that the probability of a Eurosceptic vote is highest in regions that receive insufficient compensation, that is, middle-income regions that are not targeted by the funding as well as some of the poorest regions. Studies exploring the multi-level relationship between EU programmes and individual attitudes exhibit analytical weaknesses in that they disregard a crucial micro-level link in the hypothesised causal mechanism. ...
... There seems to be potential for CP to boost societal support for the integration project, which, however, remains unexploited due to the low visibility of such programmes and, consequently, the limited awareness of these kinds of EU initiatives among citizens. This is consistent with recent contributions pointing out the relatively modest scope of European regional redistribution and its ineffectiveness in taming Eurosceptic voting in those areas that remain cut off from the bulk of the funding (Schraff, 2019). To counteract Eurosceptic tendencies, therefore, it would be important to invest more resources in CP and to make EU social citizenship more visible and its content more substantial, for example by introducing a clearly identifiable 'EU Social Card' (Ferrera, 2019), or by ensuring the effectiveness of programmes such as the Social Climate Fund, which sets out to provide direct income support for vulnerable households negatively affected by the green transition. ...
In the twentieth century national social policies stabilized the European state systems, favouring domestic concordance and citizens' support to the nation-building process. Welfare institutions have historically served this key political function also in federal systems, where social citizenship has been used as a tool to foster unity. In contrast, even though the EU devotes a consistent part of its (however limited) budget to social cohesion and inclusion programmes, it takes little credit for such efforts. Building on original survey data on public opinion collected in 2019 across ten EU countries, this article shows that, indeed, only a limited number of citizens are aware of the social role played by the EU in their local community. On the other hand, it demonstrates that citizens' awareness of EU programmes strengthens the individual perception of power resources stemming from euro-social initiatives, the feeling of 'being heard' by the EU and, ultimately, the support for the European integration project as a whole. By implication, increasing the relevance and visibility of euro-social programmes could possibly reinforce the very foundations of the EU.
... Yet, EU funds have also shaped regional inequalities and contributed to a widening gap between EU regions (e.g., Heidenreich & Wunder, 2007). Regional wealth differentials tend to account for Eurosceptic voting and institutional distrust (Díaz-Lanchas et al., 2021;Lipps & Schraff, 2021;Mayne & Katsanidou, 2023;Schraff, 2019). While there is strong longitudinal variation in the relationship between subnational economic conditions and support for European integration (Mayne & Katsanidou, 2023), overall, the literature suggests that in the period following the financial crisis citizens living in lagging behind regions are more likely to express EU discontent (Díaz-Lanchas et al., 2021;Lipps & Schraff, 2021;Mayne & Katsanidou, 2023). ...
... In sum, this is the manifestation of the 'revenge of the places that do not matter' (Rodríguez-Pose, 2018). However, this overlooks the fact that EU discontent has also been observed among rich (Dijkstra et al., 2020) as well as those middle-income regions which receive insufficient compensation from the EU (Schraff, 2019). ...
... Research suggests that this policy has yielded positive economic growth returns of investment in poor EU regions (for a discussion, see Rodríguez-Pose & Dijkstra, 2021). However, EU structural funds have also been criticised for being allocated following party-political considerations or for offering insufficient compensation, thus often widening regional inequalities (Bouvet & Dall'erba, 2010;Dellmuth, 2011;Dellmuth et al., 2017;Heidenreich & Wunder, 2007;Schraff, 2019). Using evidence from household-level income data for more than 2.4 million survey respondents in Europe during 1989-2017, Lang et al. (2022) find that the EU's cohesion policy tends to primarily improve incomes of rich and highly skilled households, rather than improving regional economic disparities. ...
... In particular, we can distinguish between two approaches. A first approach looks at what are defined as compositional effects, and studies the role that sociodemographic characteristics, such as income, education and age of the individuals, or cultural factors such as political orientation and tolerance towards immigrants, drive anti-EU sentiment (Kenny & Luca, 2021;Koeppen et al., 2021;Schoene, 2019;Schraff, 2019). A more recent strand of the literature, initiated by Dijkstra et al. (2020), extends previous research by stressing the role of contextual factors -including geography -as an additional driver of anti-EU sentiment, originating what is well known as the "geography of EU discontent". ...
... Recent studies based either on microdata (Jennings et al., 2016;Ramiro, 2016) or data aggregated at electoral district or regional level (Algan et al., 2017;Dijkstra et al., 2020;Essletzbichler et al., 2018;Gordon, 2018;Guiso et al., 2018;Lechler, 2019;Nicoli, 2017;Schraff, 2019) show that economic and socio-demographic factors, such as age, education, unemployment or wealth can explain the surge of anti-system and anti-EU voting. ...
... These two variables approximate the local economic conditions and the dynamics over time, respectively. The role of GDP per capita has been highlighted by (Schraff, 2019) who, combining European Social Survey data (ESS) with regional level data, finds that disadvantaged poor regions and middle-income regions show significantly higher probabilities of Eurosceptic voting, a result confirmed more recently by Dijkstra et al. (2020). In addition, wealth can also be associated to a higher propensity to cast votes for anti-EU parties, in richer countries or regions where voters, for instance, may believe they do not need the EU, as their national governments are able to provide them what they need (Dijkstra et al., 2020). ...
In recent years, protest voting, voting for populist parties and, specifically for Europe, votes for parties opposed to European integration, have increased substantially. This has focused the attention of researchers and policy makers on the causes behind this trend. Most of the existing research looked at voters' characteristics, mainly values, education and age, or economic insecurity, such as rising unemployment or a declining economy more in general. This paper focuses instead on the urban-rural divide in anti-EU sentiment, and tries to explain why cities – and urban areas in general - in Europe tend to vote less for Eurosceptic parties. Using electoral data for national elections at the electoral district level for the years 2013–2018 and political parties' orientation as assessed by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we find robust statistical evidence of a lower anti-EU vote in cities, towns and suburbs than in rural areas. We also find that drivers of voting for anti-EU parties differ significantly between urban and rural areas in the EU and UK, despite some similarities. We show that three factors are associated to a higher anti-EU vote in all areas: growth in unemployment, a low turnout and a higher share of people born outside the EU. A sluggish economy is associated to a higher anti-EU sentiment in rural areas, but not in cities and towns and suburbs. Higher shares of university graduates, people aged 20–64, and of people born in a different EU country reduce anti-EU voting in rural areas and towns and suburbs, but have no impact in cities.
... Still, dissatisfaction with the EU constitutes a fundamental expression of social discontent in contemporary European societies. Scholars have studied different phenomena as proxies of EU discontent: the rise in support for eurosceptic parties Lechler, 2019;Nicoli, 2017;Nicoli and Reinl, 2020;Rodríguez-Pose and Dijkstra, 2020;Schraff, 2019;Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2018); the loss of political trust in European institutions (Armingeon and Ceka, 2014;Foster and Frieden, 2017;Torcal and Christmann, 2019);public Euroscepticism (de Vries, 2018;Gomez, 2014;Lechler, 2019); and the vote to leave in the Brexit referendum (Abreu and Öner, 2020;Alabrese et al., 2019;Garretsen et al., 2018;Hobolt, 2016;Los et al., 2017). The diversity of these studies illustrates how discontent with the EU manifests itself in different ways. ...
... We find a complementary perspective on the impact of material factors in studies that account for contextual factors such as regional economic decline Rodríguez-Pose, 2018), global economic dislocations (Rodrik, 2018), and insufficient regional compensation (Rodríguez-Pose and Schraff, 2019). Recent empirical research on EU attitudes shows that public Euroscepticism has increased since the 2008 Financial Crisis (Foster and Frieden, 2017;Gomez, 2014;Ioannou et al., 2015;Nicoli, 2017). ...
... In addition, literature in economic geography suggests that the spatially divergent patterns of EU discontent are the outcome of more long-term processes Los et al., 2017;McCann, 2020;Rodríguez-Pose, 2018;Schraff, 2019). These recent studies propose that regional economic and industrial decline processes trigger individual perceptions of unfairness and lack of future opportunities. ...
Two principal strands of scholarship analyse the material roots of European Union (EU) discontent. Some focus on the effects of regional decline, while others examine the role of individual socioeconomic factors. This paper brings these two perspectives together. We argue that EU discontent is a multifaceted phenomenon structured by the spatially-rooted interplay between individual and regional material conditions and subjective perceptions. We apply PLS-SEM to Eurobarometer public opinion data (2018–2019) and find that the geographical location and the socioeconomic position shape EU discontent directly. However, material factors’ relevance for EU discontent is the greatest in structuring individual future expectations. Furthermore, democratic dissatisfaction turns out to be a key factor, pointing to the importance of institutional perceptions in the geography of discontent.
... Most assessments of the link between the territorial allocation of EU funding and Eurosceptic voting patterns are anchored in national case studiesand, most notably, in UK research linked to Brexit. The very limited number of studies posing the question from a European dimension (e.g., Borin et al., 2018;Schraff, 2019) generally rely on large territorial units and survey data, rather than on real electoral outcomes. This means that, for the whole of the EU, whether investment in regional development and territorial cohesion has attenuated the rise of Euroscepticism remains an open question. ...
... The approach adopted here moves the analysis forward relative to other studies that have tackled a similar topic from a European-wide perspective (e.g., Borin et al., 2018;Henceroth & Oganesyan, 2019;Schraff, 2019) on several counts. First, with more than 63,000 electoral districts covered in all 27 member states of the EU plus the UK, the paper is far more comprehensive in its geographical coverage than anything that has been attempted so far. ...
... Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Lewis Dijkstra survey data (e.g., Borin et al., 2018;Schraff, 2019). While this does not disqualify this type of studies, the number of observations from the ESS at a regional level is rather small. ...
Some regions in Europe that have been heavily supported by the European Union’s Cohesion Policy have recently opted for parties with a strong Eurosceptic orientation. The results at the ballot box have been put forward as evidence that Cohesion Policy is ineffective for tackling the rising, European-wide wave of discontent. However, the evidence to support this view is scarce and often contradictory. This paper analyses the link between Cohesion Policy and the vote for Eurosceptic parties. It uses the share of votes cast for Eurosceptic parties in more than 63,000 electoral districts in national legislative elections in the EU-28 to assess whether Cohesion Policy investment since the year 2000 has made a difference for the electoral support for parties opposed to European integration. The results indicate that Cohesion Policy investment is linked to a lower anti-EU vote. This result is robust to employing different econometric approaches, to considering the variety of European development funds, to different periods of investment, to different policy domains, to shifts in the unit of analysis and to different levels of opposition by parties to the European project.
... In particular, we can distinguish between two approaches. A first approach highlights that individual characteristics, such as income, education and age, or cultural factors such as political orientation and tolerance towards immigrants, drive anti-EU sentiment (Schoene, 2019;Schraff, 2019). A more recent strand of the literature, initiated by Dijkstra et al. (2020), extends previous research by including geography as an additional driver of anti-EU sentiment, originating what is well-known as the Geography of EU discontent. ...
... Recent studies based either on microdata (Jennings et al., 2016;Ramiro, 2016) or data aggregated at electoral district or regional level (Algan et al., 2017;Nicoli, 2017;Gordon, 2018;Essletzbichler et al., 2018;Dijkstra et al. 2020, Lechler, 2019Schraff, 2019;Guiso et al., 2018) show that economic and socio-demographic factors, such as age, education, unemployment and wealth drive anti-system and anti-EU voting. Therefore, we control for: 3 The nomenclature of territorial units for statistics (NUTS) is a classification for the EU and the UK providing a harmonised hierarchy of regions. ...
... Ý Education consists in the share of adults (25-64) with a tertiary education, observed in 2017, at the NUTS2 level. Following the recent literature (see Dijkstra et al. 2020;Lechler, 2019;Schraff, 2019, among others), highly educated voters are expected to support less anti-EU parties, as they have on average better jobs and a more cosmopolitan view, in opposition to lower educated voters that, according to Gordon (2018), are more likely to support more localist and anti-establishment parties. ...
In recent years, protest voting, voting for populist parties and, specifically for Europe, votes for parties opposed to European integration, have increased substantially. This has focussed the attention of researchers and policy makers on the causes behind this trend. Most of the existing research looked at voters’ characteristics, mainly values, education and age, or economic insecurity, such as rising unemployment or a declining economy more in general. This paper focuses instead on the urban-rural divide in anti-EU sentiment, and tries to explain why cities – and urban areas in general - in Europe tend
to vote less for Eurosceptic parties. Using electoral data for national elections at the electoral district level
for the years 2013-2018 and political parties’ orientation as assessed by the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we find robust statistical evidence of a lower anti-EU vote in cities, towns and suburbs than in rural areas. We also find that drivers of voting for anti-EU parties differ significantly between urban and rural areas in the EU and UK, despite some similarities. We show that three factors are associated to a higher anti-EU vote in all areas: growth in unemployment, a low turnout and a higher share of people born outside the EU. A sluggish economy is associated to a higher anti-EU sentiment in rural areas, but not in cities and towns and suburbs. Higher shares of university graduates, people aged 20-64, and of people born in a different EU country reduce anti-EU voting in rural areas and towns and suburbs, but have no impact in cities.
... This differentiation is necessary to better understand political divisions within the European citizenry because political attitudes can often differ among citizens with diverging social backgrounds (e.g., in terms of education, income, occupational status or social class affiliation) and thus along different positions within the hierarchical system of social stratification. At the same time, they could also be influenced by the socio-economic situation of the country and region they live in, given that citizens live in a more or less favourable social context (Lubbers and Scheepers 2005;Schraff 2019;Lauterbach and de Vries 2020). On the other hand, I will focus on the "subjective" dimension of social inequalities because research has convincingly demonstrated that political attitudes are also determined by the way citizens perceive social inequalities (Mause and Schlipphak 2016;Ritzen et al. 2016;Simpson 2019). ...
... Additionally, the analysis has to consider the subjective dimension of social inequalities, here, in particular, the way citizens assess their position within society. Previous studies have corroborated that these dimensions have an impact on the political support of the EU (Lubbers and Scheepers 2005;Schraff 2019;Kuhn et al. 2016;Ritzen et al. 2016) but here the attempt is to develop an integrated account of social and spatial cleavages. Conforming to the field-theoretical approach introduced in Chapter 2, I wish, finally, to ponder on the potential effect the perceptions of different living conditions in other European countries can have on the support or criticism of the European Union in order to substantiate the assumption that the social position of European citizens (both in stratificational and spatial terms) conditions the degree to which they support or oppose the EU. ...
The support of the European Union is strongly influenced by social inequalities, as this chapter shows. In regard to subjective perceptions, it makes use of a representative survey from eight countries (Denmark, Germany, France, Greece, Italy, Poland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom) to measure the extent to which the support of a country’s EU membership is influenced by the perception of unequal living conditions between Europeans. Findings show an intriguing picture. While satisfaction with national politics suffers when citizens see themselves as worse off than other Europeans, the approval of EU membership increases. In regard to objective inequalities, the analysis is expanded to the EU’s 28 member states to provide a nuanced picture of the impact of spatial inequalities. A multilevel analysis shows that support of the EU depends on inequalities that are placed at the individual, regional and national levels alike. Social divisions between privileged and disadvantaged citizens and regions translate into a political conflict between pro-Europeans and Eurosceptics. This cleavage is qualified by the subjective perceptions reported before. Respondents seem to honour membership in a community that has better-off members because the latter keep the EU’s promise of striving for comparable living conditions for all Europeans alive.
... Yet, with little success: the Brexit vote highlighted the serious consequences of economic divides across subnational areas for preferences towards EU integration (Hobolt 2016;O'Reilly et al. 2016). Moreover, Eurosceptic voting seems to follow a spatial pattern that mirrors divides in regional wealth differentials (Schraff 2019). These rising inequalities are likely to shape political trust across Europe's multi-level governance system. ...
... Recent processes of modernization and globalization have increased the spatial concentration of economic losers, amplifying regionally concentrated negative social conditions. 1 Certain geographical areas lose out under increased global competition due to the adjustments costs of trade (Colantone & Stanig 2018) and insufficient compensation (Schraff 2019). The citizens in poor areas experience -on average -weaker social capital, slower growth, less trust and, therefore, more grievances and relative deprivation. ...
Inequality is a central explanation of political distrust in democracies, but has so far rarely been considered a cause of (dis‐)trust towards supranational governance. Moreover, while political scientists have extensively engaged with income inequality, other salient forms of inequality, such as the regional wealth distribution, have been sidelined. These issues point to a more general shortcoming in the literature. Determinants of trust in national and European institutions are often theorized independently, even though empirical studies have demonstrated large interdependence in citizens’ evaluations of national and supranational governance levels. In this paper, we argue that inequality has two salient dimensions: 1) income inequality and 2) regional inequality. Both dimensions are important antecedent causes of EU trust, the effects of which are mediated by evaluations of national institutions. On the micro‐level, we suggest that inequality decreases a person's trust in national institutions and thereby diminishes the positive effect of national trust on EU trust. On the macro‐level, inequality decreases country averages of trust in national institutions. This, however, informs an individual's trust in the EU positively, compensating for the seemingly untrustworthiness of national institutions. Finally, we propose that residing in an economically declining region can depress institutional trust. We find empirical support for our arguments by analysing regional temporal change over four waves of the European Social Survey 2010–2016 with a sample of 209 regions nested in 24 EU member states. We show that changes in a member state's regional inequality have similarly strong effects on trust as changes in the Gini coefficient of income inequality. Applying causal mediation techniques, we can show that the effects of inequality on EU trust are largely mediated through citizens’ evaluations of national institutions. In contrast, residing in an economically declining region directly depresses EU trust, with economically lagging areas turning their back on European governance and resorting to the national level instead. Our findings highlight the relevance of regional inequality for refining our understanding of citizens’ support for Europe's multi‐level governance system and the advantages of causal modelling for the analysis of political preferences in a multi‐level governance system.
... This differentiation is necessary to better understand political divisions within the European citizenry because political attitudes can often differ among citizens with diverging social backgrounds (e.g., in terms of education, income, occupational status or social class affiliation) and thus along different positions within the hierarchical system of social stratification. At the same time, they could also be influenced by the socio-economic situation of the country and region they live in, given that citizens live in a more or less favourable social context (Lubbers and Scheepers 2005;Schraff 2019;Lauterbach and de Vries 2020). On the other hand, I will focus on the "subjective" dimension of social inequalities because research has convincingly demonstrated that political attitudes are also determined by the way citizens perceive social inequalities (Mause and Schlipphak 2016;Ritzen et al. 2016;Simpson 2019). ...
... Additionally, the analysis has to consider the subjective dimension of social inequalities, here, in particular, the way citizens assess their position within society. Previous studies have corroborated that these dimensions have an impact on the political support of the EU (Lubbers and Scheepers 2005;Schraff 2019;Kuhn et al. 2016;Ritzen et al. 2016) but here the attempt is to develop an integrated account of social and spatial cleavages. Conforming to the field-theoretical approach introduced in Chapter 2, I wish, finally, to ponder on the potential effect the perceptions of different living conditions in other European countries can have on the support or criticism of the European Union in order to substantiate the assumption that the social position of European citizens (both in stratificational and spatial terms) conditions the degree to which they support or oppose the EU. ...
This book unveils the significant impact of the European integration process on the political thinking of European citizens. With close attention to the interrelation between social and political divisions, it shows that an integrated Europe promotes consensus but also propagates growing dissent among its citizens, with both objective inequalities and the subjective perception of these inequalities fuelling political dissent. Based on original data sets developed from two EU-funded projects across eight and nine European countries, the volume demonstrates the important role played by the social structure of European social space in conditioning political attitudes and preferences. It shows, in particular, that Europeans are highly sensitive to unequal living conditions between European countries, thus affecting their political support of national politics and the European Union. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology and politics with interests in Europe and the European Union, European integration and political sociology.
... In other words, the predicted probabilities of having confidence and their 95 per cent confidence intervals are 0.018 [0.002;0.033] in the poorest regions and 0.491 [0.433;0.548] in the richest regions. This finding underlines previous economic theories of regional inequalities and political discontent emphasising the importance of regional income (e.g., Lipps & Schraff, 2021;Mayne & Katsanidou, 2023;Schraff, 2019). ...
Climate change, health pandemics, structural decline, and more – the challenges of solving political problems are daunting, particularly when the political institutions addressing them are not trusted. This article tests the economic theory that residents of high-income regions are more likely to trust political institutions, given their positive experiences with services and opportunities, against the rival argument that predicts a negative effect of regional disadvantage within a country on political trust. Using European Values Study and World Values Survey (2017–2020) data, combined with socioeconomic data for 606 regions in 42 countries, this paper analyses samples of regions both in and outside the EU. The results suggest that people living in wealthy EU regions – both in absolute and relative terms – trust national government more and the EU less. In the global sample, the evidence is more variegated and corroborates economic theory only in democracies. The article sketches implications for regional inequality, political trust, and legitimacy research.
... Para paliar esta situación se argumenta que una mayor inversión en desarrollo debería realizarse para generar estrategias de desarrollo viables y sólidas en aquellas regiones que se han quedado rezagadas (Iammarino et al., 2019;Rodríguez-Pose & Dijkstra, 2020). Como muestra Schraff (2019), la inversión europea en desarrollo regional ha contribuido a reducir el porcentaje de votos a los partidos euroescépticos. Sin embargo, no es suficiente únicamente con invertir, sino que el "cómo" y en "qué" determina su efectividad: la conexión entre la inversión europea en desarrollo regional y la reducción del voto euroescéptico depende en gran manera del tipo de inversión y en su eficacia. ...
El espacio exsoviético representa un área de influencia disputada y donde se desarrollan estrategias de desestabilización propias de la zona gris. El análisis de la distribución de etnias, lengua, indicadores económicos y geografía electoral puede servir como herramienta para identificar aquellas regiones netamente diferenciadas del resto y que puedan socavar su estatalidad. Moldavia constituye un buen ejemplo debido a la persistencia de un conflicto congelado (Transnistria), una región autónoma (Gagauzia) y una polarización política entre el proeuropeísmo y la alianza con Rusia. Los datos provienen de fuentes primarias locales y oficiales, a los que ha seguido un análisis estadístico y cartográfico. Se completa con información actual y contextualizada respecto de las elecciones de 2020. Como conclusiones se desprende que el país se encuentra fracturado entre el norte y el centro, y un sur con amplia presencia de minorías étnicas bien circunscritas. Por ello, es necesario invertir en las regiones en declive prolongado y asegurar la convivencia pacífica en un Estado multicultural como método para la prevención de conflicto, frente a un escenario de potencial fragmentación territorial. El análisis interdisciplinar es extrapolable a otros países de la zona gris y constituye una herramienta de ayuda para afianzar la credibilidad europea.
... En cuanto al término fascismo, éste no se adapta a la realidad al incluir un sentido militarista del cual adolecen los partidos objetos de estudio. Por el contrario, el elemento vertebrador del movimiento estudiado es la defensa de Estados-nación únicamente compuestos por nativos, pasando a representar los elementos foráneos -tanto ideas como personas-una amenaza (Finnsdottir, 2019;Gidron & Hall, 2019;Golder, 2016;Halikiopoulou & Vlandas, 2016;Rodrik, 2018;Savelkoul et al., 2017;Schraff, 2019). Consecuentemente, optamos a lo largo del estudio por utilizar el término partidos ultranacionalistas para definir el elemento analizado. ...
... En cuanto al término fascismo, éste no se adapta a la realidad al incluir un sentido militarista del cual adolecen los partidos objetos de estudio. Por el contrario, el elemento vertebrador del movimiento estudiado es la defensa de Estados-nación únicamente compuestos por nativos, pasando a representar los elementos foráneos -tanto ideas como personas-una amenaza (Finnsdottir, 2019;Gidron & Hall, 2019;Golder, 2016;Halikiopoulou & Vlandas, 2016;Rodrik, 2018;Savelkoul et al., 2017;Schraff, 2019). Consecuentemente, optamos a lo largo del estudio por utilizar el término partidos ultranacionalistas para definir el elemento analizado. ...
En este texto queremos analizar el concepto de adolescencia y como este responde a la constitución de un grupo de edad como periodización ritualizada, una edad absoluta dentro de la sucesión de las principales etapas del ciclo vital. El término adolescencia carga con varios significados que se proyectan hacia personas que se encuentran en esta fase intermedia entre la niñez y la adultez. Desde que se empezó a estudiar esta etapa vital, hace ya más de un siglo, existe un debate abierto sobre la universalidad de la adolescencia. No obstante, desde una forma propositiva, se puede entender el concepto desde una cierta complejidad, atendiendo toda la controversia que suscita. Para definirlo se superponen diferentes visiones, ya que no son pocas las miradas de diferentes disciplinas científicas sobre la adolescencia.
... En cuanto al término fascismo, éste no se adapta a la realidad al incluir un sentido militarista del cual adolecen los partidos objetos de estudio. Por el contrario, el elemento vertebrador del movimiento estudiado es la defensa de Estados-nación únicamente compuestos por nativos, pasando a representar los elementos foráneos -tanto ideas como personas-una amenaza (Finnsdottir, 2019;Gidron & Hall, 2019;Golder, 2016;Halikiopoulou & Vlandas, 2016;Rodrik, 2018;Savelkoul et al., 2017;Schraff, 2019). Consecuentemente, optamos a lo largo del estudio por utilizar el término partidos ultranacionalistas para definir el elemento analizado. ...
Desde una perspectiva etnográfica, ofrecemos una mirada al mundo institucional de una empresa multinacional de la industria agroalimentaria ubicada en Extremadura, con el fin de observar y presentar las concepciones que las trabajadoras y los trabajadores tienen sobre el género y la diversidad sexual; además de poner en evidencia las contradicciones que se presentan dentro de las manifestaciones discursivas producto de la cultura local y un discurso multinacional que se supone europeo y en consonancia con las políticas organizaciones del siglo XXI; donde la diversidad y la interculturalidad deberían ser valores positivos y muy apreciados en las empresas, pero que en la vida cotidiana no lo son. Esto repercute negativamente en la vida de trabajadoras y trabajadores jóvenes, con identidades y sexualidades no hegemónicas, que sufren episodios cotidianos de discriminación y violencia simbólica.
... En cuanto al término fascismo, éste no se adapta a la realidad al incluir un sentido militarista del cual adolecen los partidos objetos de estudio. Por el contrario, el elemento vertebrador del movimiento estudiado es la defensa de Estados únicamente compuestos por nativos, pasando a representar los elementos foráneos (tanto ideas como personas) una amenaza (Finnsdottir, 2019;Gidron & Hall, 2019;Golder, 2016;Halikiopoulou & Vlandas, 2016;Rodrik, 2018;Savelkoul et al., 2017;Schraff, 2019). Por ello optamos a lo largo del estudio por utilizar el término partidos ultranacionalistas para definir el elemento analizado. ...
As globalisation has accelerated over the past 30 years, ultranationalist parties have gained electoral strength in Western Europe. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse how globalisation has influenced the resurgence of ultranationalism in Western Europe. In order to fulfil this objective, we constructed a multiple linear regression with trade openness and migration as explanatory variables. The main results obtained are that the share of immigration and the interaction of trade openness with the increase in immigration have a direct relationship with the rise of ultranationalism in Western Europe.
... En cuanto al término fascismo, éste no se adapta a la realidad al incluir un sentido militarista del cual adolecen los partidos objetos de estudio. Por el contrario, el elemento vertebrador del movimiento estudiado es la defensa de Estados-nación únicamente compuestos por nativos, pasando a representar los elementos foráneos -tanto ideas como personas-una amenaza (Finnsdottir, 2019;Gidron & Hall, 2019;Golder, 2016;Halikiopoulou & Vlandas, 2016;Rodrik, 2018;Savelkoul et al., 2017;Schraff, 2019). Consecuentemente, optamos a lo largo del estudio por utilizar el término partidos ultranacionalistas para definir el elemento analizado. ...
El objetivo del presente estudio es analizar las inmigraciones, elemento de la globalización, como determinante del auge de partidos ultranacionalistas en Europa Occidental al haber sido capaz de canalizar el malestar emocional de la juventud.
La justificación en llevar a cabo la presente investigación viene determinada por el necesario interés en entender los motivos por los que se fortalecen los partidos ultranacionalistas para poder combatirlos en el marco ideológico.
... A growing stream of literature has established the link between regional EU 'convergence' funding and restrained skepticism regarding the EU integration process or moderate support for Eurosceptic parties (Borin, Macchi, and Mancini, 2021;Rodríguez-Pose and Dijkstra, 2021;Schraff, 2019). Such a relationship seems plausible as long as Euroscepticism is rooted in economic grounds. ...
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.
... A growing stream of literature has established the link between regional EU 'convergence' funding and restrained skepticism regarding the EU integration process or moderate support for Eurosceptic parties (Borin, Macchi, and Mancini, 2021;Rodríguez-Pose and Dijkstra, 2021;Schraff, 2019). Such a relationship seems plausible as long as Euroscepticism is rooted in economic grounds. ...
... Subnational variation in electoral outcomes is of central interest to comparative politics and the geographic polarization of electoral maps has recently received increasing attention (Dijkstra et al., 2019;Rodden, 2010;Schraff, 2019;Stockemer, 2017;Winkler, 2019). Disaggregated election data is used to improve our understanding of manifold political outcomes and processes. ...
Datasets on subnational election results in Europe frequently do not match with regional statistics available for cross-national research, mainly because territorial statistical units change over time and do not map onto the national electoral districts. This hinders consistent comparative research across time. This research note introduces EU-NED, a new dataset on subnational election data that covers national and European parliamentary elections for European countries over the past 30 years. EU-NED’s major contribution is that it provides election results on disaggregated levels of the statistical territorial units used by Eurostat with an unprecedented consistency and temporospatial scope. Moreover, EU-NED is integrated with the Party Facts platform, allowing for a seamless integration of party-level data. Using EU-NED, we present first descriptive evidence on the European electoral geography and suggest avenues of how EU-NED can facilitate future comparative political science research in Europe.
... Many spending policies outlined in the various ESIF programmes are of a redistributive nature, which should not only increase citizens' awareness of these policies (Dellmuth and Chalmers, 2018), but which has also be shown to drive partisan politics at the sub-national level (see for example Kemmerling and Bodenstein, 2006;Schraff, 2019). Additionally, 'the funds distributed to the regions via CP represent the most substantive and tangible manifestation of the EU policy for the regions' (Massetti and Schakel, 2016, p. 217). ...
A key element of the European Union's (EU) attempt to foster citizens' EU identification is its goal to improve citizens' quality of life via its Cohesion policy (CP). Although recent findings demonstrate that the allocation of CP money positively affects sub-national parties' positions on EU integration and CP, we still do not know if sub-national parties actually talk about CP issues in their manifestos. Using a unique data set based on manually coded 812 manifestos written by 95 different parties in 47 regions in Germany, Spain, The Netherlands, and the United Kingdom between 2007 and 2016, it is argued that several party-level characteristics are decisive for sub-national parties' emphasis of CP issues. Even though sub-national parties emphasize CP issues only to a small degree, the results of multilevel mixed-effects Tobit regressions show that it is particularly regional government parties which emphasize CP issues when drafting their regional election manifestos.
... This process is further reinforced by the negative bias of news regarding the EU (De Vreese, 2004), as well as popular media's tendency to sensationalize possibly threatening processes such as the European migration crisis (Caiani & Guerra, 2017). Research shows that Eurosceptic parties tend to gain ground all around Europe, but mostly in countries with weaker economies (Schraff, 2019). ...
This study analyzes public attitudes towards Euroscepticism in three Mediterranean countries: Spain, Italy and Greece. Specifically, drawing upon cultural backlash theory, we investigate how the general feeling of nostalgia and the rejection of neoliberal values like social and cultural diversity affect citizens’ Eurosceptic attitudes and thus their willingness to leave the European Union. Based on survey data from the Pew Research Centre, we first find that attitudes towards ethnic, religious and racial diversity predict citizens’ willingness to leave the European Union in Spain and Italy, but not in Greece, whereas citizens with higher levels of nostalgia are more prone to leave the European Union in Spain and Greece, but not in Italy. Finally, attitudes towards diversity are explored as a moderator over the relationship between citizens’ perceptions of their country’s economic situation and Eurosceptic attitudes. This article contributes to current discussions on Euroscepticism, arguing that cultural backlash theory might play a crucial role in accounting for citizens’ cultural and political attitudes towards the EU.
... Inequality's effects further translate into the electoral arena, as supranational redistribution and regional inequalities can drive Eurosceptic voting (Schraff 2019b). ...
How does inequality shape regime evaluations in Europe’s multi-level governance system? I argue that rising inequality improves citizens’ evaluation of the EU’s political system. This effect is driven by two mechanisms. First, adverse social and political consequences of inequality within national democracies strongly erode national regime evaluations. This leads to an improvement of EU regime evaluations in relative terms. Second, citizens compensate negative national conditions by redirecting hopes to the supranational level. This compensation mechanisms further tilts regime evaluates in favor of the EU. An empirical analysis of change in national and European parliament trust across 27 member states and 14 years provides empirical support for this argument. It also shows that the two mechanisms coexist and that their relevance is conditioned by previous levels of regime support.
... While the interest on the regional distribution of Euroscepticism is not entirely new (see Scheepers 2007, 2010), only very recently these efforts have been systematized. Schraff (2019) looks at Euroscepticism at regional level, combining public opinion data from the 2012 European Social Survey to see the effect of regional funds on support for Eurosceptic parties. While laudable, Schraff's work has some limitations, not least (1) being limited to the year 2012, and (2) accounting only for gross transfers (i.e. ...
Hard-line Euroscepticism appears to be, nowadays, a persistent phenomenon of the later stages of European integration. However, it is unclear to what extent the joint effects of economic insecurities and growing numbers of immigrants play a role in determining the people’s choice to actually support hard-line Eurosceptic parties with their vote. Building upon the existing body of literature on the economic determinants of voting for anti-European parties, this study brings the analysis further by breaking down the electoral performance of strictly Eurosceptic parties for different types of elections at the regional level, accounting for within-country variations otherwise lost in national-level analysis. We build a dataset including the regionally distributed results of all electoral episodes (regional, national, European) between 2007 and 2016 in Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Italy for a total of 522 elections. Methodologically, the paper adopts panel-level econometrics.
... Keywords: Multi-level and hierarchical models Subnational variation in political preferences across Europe has attracted increasing attention in recent years. 1 Elections in Europe have repeatedly demonstrated the divergences of political preferences between regions (e.g., Jones et al., 1992;Schraff, 2019). A prominent example is the British vote to leave the European Union (EU), which was informed by strong geographical divides. 2 The substantial variation in living conditions across the territories of EU members states likely affects a wider range of political preferences (Beramendi, 2012;Pittau et al., 2010). ...
Subnational analyses of political preferences are substantively relevant and offer advantages for causal inference. Yet, our knowledge on regional political preferences across Europe is limited, not least because there is a lack of adequate data. The rich Eurobarometer (EB) data is a promising source for European-wide regional information. Yet, it is only representative for the national level. This paper compares state-of-the-art methods for estimating regional preferences from nationally representative EB data, validating predictions with regionally representative surveys. Our analysis highlights a number of challenges for estimating regional preferences across Europe, such as data availability, variable selection, and over-fitting. We find that predictions are best using a Bayesian additive regression tree with synthetic post-stratification.
... Populism, although far from being a new phenomenon (Hawkins and Rovira Kaltwasser 2017), has proved adept in shaping contemporary European politics, particularly in the postcrisis period, when issues related to European integration became more relevant than ever (Kriesi 2014;Kriesi andGrande 2015, 2016). Poor economic performance and particularly high levels of unemployment are considered a (mildly) favourable opportunity for populist parties in Europe (Kriesi and Pappas 2015), and can also explain the rise of hard Eurosceptic parties (Nicoli 2017;Schraff 2017). Building upon the fundamental work by Taggart (2000 and, the term 'Euroscepticism' is used in this article as an encompassing one. ...
Can a study of populist parties in Southern Europe shed light on the relation between populism and Euroscepticism? The proposed comparative framework examines the different degrees and types of Euroscepticism of populist parties in the Southern region. We expect that the variety of populist parties in this region, more oriented to the left, will help to expand our knowledge of the links between populism and Euroscepticism. Overall, our article shows that left and right-wing populist parties share what may initially look as a homogeneous Eurosceptic profile. However, further examination supports that left-wing populist parties hold more positive views of the EU in indicators related to the political side of the EU (powers of the European Parliament and enlargement).
... However, they do not include regional elections, and their timeline ends in 2014, before the beginning of the migration crisis. Finally, Schraff (2017) looks at Euroscepticism at regional level, combining public opinion data from the 2012 European Social Survey to see the effect of regional funds on support for Eurosceptic parties. While laudable, Schraff's work has some limitations, not least (1) being limited to the year 2012, and (2) accounting only for gross transfers (i.e., without accounting for regional "extra" taxation as a consequence of national contributions to the EU budget). ...
Hard-line Euroscepticism appears to be, nowadays, a persistent phenomenon of the later stages of European integration. However, it is unclear to what extent the joint effects of economic insecurities, growing numbers of immigrants and exclusive national identities play a role in determining the people’s choice to actually support hard-line Eurosceptic parties with their vote. Building upon the existing body of literature on the economic determinants of voting for anti-European parties, this study brings the analysis further by breaking down the electoral performance of strictly Eurosceptic parties at regional level. Approaching the problem at regional level holds several advantages: it allows for a more detailed understanding of unemployment and de-industrialization patterns, accounting for within-country variations otherwise lost in national-level analysis; it allows for a larger database, overcoming the inherent small-N problem when looking at electoral outcomes; and it helps reducing the bias due to potential ecological fallacy. Against this background, we build a dataset including the regionally- distributed results of all electoral episodes
(regional, national, European) between 2007 and 2015 in Austria, France, Germany, Greece and Italy for a total of 580 elections. The selection of country-cases is informed by a multi-criterion choice, in order to include federal and no-federal, founding and newer, programme and non-programme as well as core and periphery countries of the European Union. Methodologically, the paper adopts panel-level econometrics.
Cet article examine la littérature existante sur la perception et les mobilisations sub-étatiques de la politique régionale européenne – la politique la plus importante de l’Union européenne en matière de developpement régional. Se focalisant sur les partis régionalistes, les administrations régionales et le public régional, cet article propose une lecture récapitulative et structurée des connaissances empiriques et théoriques existantes sur la façon dont la politique régionale affecte les attitudes de ces acteurs vis-à-vis de l'Union européenne. Pour combler les lacunes identifiées, sans omettre de considérer les défis de recherche actuels liés aux évolutions en cours d’une Union européenne en crise, plusieurs axes de recherche appuyés sur un nouveau cadre analytique sont proposés.
In 2020/2021, the EU and its member states had to tackle the largest shock of the twenty-first century yet, the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 led to an unprecedented health and economic crisis. In this article, we analyse public opinion on redistributive EU measures based on an original survey in Austria, Germany and Italy and ask whether EU citizens support a common aid package, common debt and redistribution to those countries that are economically most in need. Testing the influence of three explanatory concepts – self-interest, justice attitudes and general support of European integration – we find that all three explanatory concepts have predictive power. However, we find stronger effects on support for EU-level redistribution for citizens’ instrumental calculations concerning whether their country benefits from EU aid, and on general support for EU integration, than for justice attitudes.
The decentralization of funding management poses a conceptual challenge to the study of political criteria in the allocation of funding in the EU Cohesion Policy, as existing research often assumes unidimensional actor constellations and motivations. Combining insights from distributive politics and multilevel party politics, this article uses a unique data set of beneficiary data at the local level from Polish Regional Operational Programs (2007–2013) to explore the ability of regional authorities to engage in vote-seeking and explores how institutional and political multilevel structures affect these strategies. We demonstrate that the vote-seeking of sub-national authorities is constrained in two ways. Competition between regional and national authorities limits the possibility of regional governments that are politically opposed to the national government targeting their electoral strongholds. In contrast, partisan harmony between different institutional levels incentivizes a vote-seeking strategy that takes into consideration electoral dynamics at both the regional and national level.
Since the Eurozone crisis, intense political debate has resurfaced about deservingness judgements in European solidarity. To contribute to this debate, this article proposes a refined concept of ‘multi-level blame attribution’. It postulates that public support for EU-level welfare policies crucially depends on how citizens attribute responsibility for economic outcomes across different levels of agency. Results from an original public opinion survey conducted in 10 European Union member states demonstrate that attributing blame to individuals decreases citizens’ willingness to show solidarity with needy Europeans, whereas attributing blame to the EU increases support. The role of attributing blame to national governments is dependent on the country context; beliefs that worse economic outcomes are caused by national governments’ policy decisions tend to dampen support for EU targeted welfare policies only in the Nordic welfare states. The article concludes by discussing the implications of multi-level blame attribution for the formation of public attitudes towards European solidarity.
Durante los últimos 30 años los partidos ultranacionalistas han aumentado su cuota de poder en Europa Occidental a la par que la globalización se ha desarrollado. El objetivo de esta investigación es realizar una revisión de la literatura existente para comprobar la relación entre la globalización y el resurgimiento de partidos ultranacionalistas en Europa Occidental. La principal conclusión obtenida es la existencia de la inmigración como determinante del ultranacionalismo. Sin embargo, existe escasa investigación sobre otros elementos de la globalización como el comercio global, la desigualdad y el cambio institucional como determinantes. Así mismo, son pocos los estudios de metodología longitudinal y que toman los resultados electorales como técnica de medición del ultranacionalismo. Recogemos estos vacíos en el área para futuros investigaciones.
While public support is central to the problem-solving capacity of the European Union, we know little about when and why the EU can increase its citizens’ support through spending. Extensive research finds that citizens living in countries that are net beneficiaries of the EU budget are more supportive of the EU, assuming that citizens care equally about all forms of spending. It is argued in this article, however, that the amount of spending is only part of the story. Understanding the effects of spending on support requires a consideration of how transfers are spent. Drawing on policy feedback theories in comparative politics, it is shown that support for the EU is a function of the fit between the spending area and economic need in individuals’ immediate living context. Results from a statistical analysis of EU spending on human capital, infrastructure, agriculture, energy and environmental protection in 127 EU regions over the period 2001–2011 corroborate this argument. As the EU and other international organisations become increasingly publicly contested, the organisations themselves may increasingly try to shore up public support through spending, but they will only be successful under specific conditions.
Instead of alleviating fiscal inequalities, intergovernmental grants are often used to fulfill the grantors’ political goals. This study uses a unique panel dataset on more than 500 Croatian municipalities over a 12-year period to uncover the extent to which grant distribution is biased owing to grantors’ electoral concerns. Instead of the default fixed effects approach to modelling panel data, we apply a novel within-between specification aimed at uncovering the contextual source of variation, focusing on the effects of electoral concerns on grant allocation within and between municipalities. We find evidence of a substantial political bias in grant allocations both within and between municipalities, particularly when it comes to local-level electoral concerns. The paper offers researchers a new perspective when tackling the issue of politically biased grant allocation using panel data, particularly when they wish to uncover the simultaneous impact of time-variant and time-invariant factors, or when they cannot apply a quasi-experimental approach because of specific institutional contexts.
Empirical studies have demonstrated that compared to almost all other parties, populist radical right (PRR) parties draw more votes from men than from women. However, the two dominant explanations that are generally advanced to explain this disparity – gender differences regarding socio-economic position and lower perceptions regarding the threat of immigrants – cannot fully explain the difference. The article contends that it might actually be gender differences regarding the conceptualisation of society and politics – populist attitudes – that explain the gender gap. Thus, the gap may be due, in part, to differences in socialisation. The article analyses EES 2014 data on voting for the populist radical right and the populist radical left in nine European countries. Across countries, the gender gap in voting for the PRR is indeed partly explained by populist attitudes. For populist radical left parties, the results are less clear, suggesting that populism has different meanings to voters on the left and on the right.
The Eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the Euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe.
This study examines the role of European integration as a potential source of income inequality in countries of the European Union. We distinguish between both economic and political integration and identify theoretical mechanisms that link the two to rising levels of inequality. The empirical analysis draws on time-series-cross-section data covering 14 European Union member states for the time period 1999–2010. In particular, we make use of a newly available dataset that measures individual degrees of integration across different dimensions. Our main finding is a positive association between political integration and inequality on the one hand as well as a nonassociation between economic integration and inequality on the other hand. This suggests that the recent trend toward inequality at the European Union national level is at least partly related to deepening political integration at the supranational level.
This article contributes to existing debates on public opinion toward European integration by examining when and why fiscal transfers and public support are systematically related. Drawing on economic and identity-related theories, we develop and test hypotheses about the links between European Union fiscal transfers among countries and subnational jurisdictions, and citizens’ support for European integration. Using a three-level analysis of residents in 143 regions in 16 European Union member states, we find a positive effect of European Union transfers among both countries and subnational jurisdictions on support for European integration among those with a European communal identity. We also find that this effect increases the more politically aware individuals are. The article sketches the broader implications of our findings for public opinion research on regional integration beyond the European Union.
This research note elaborates on the role of electoral mobilization in the allocation of EU structural funding. Revising current findings on the German Länder, I show that stronghold regions with a high level of electoral mobilization receive more money. This strategy is conceptualized as 'rewarding loyalists.' The article argues that due to temporally stable turnout levels, incumbents have incentives to favor stronghold regions with high turnout rates. Hence, incumbents use differences in the level of electoral mobilization to make distributive decisions among their many core constituencies. To test for spatial interdependencies and autocorrelation, I use a spatial autoregressive model as a robustness check. Even though the data shows spatial interdependencies, the results remain the same. © The Author(s) 2013 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
European radical left parties (RLPs) are gradually receiving greater attention. Yet, to date, what has received insufficient focus is why such parties have maintained residues of electoral support after the collapse of the USSR and why this support varies so widely. This article is the first to subject RLPs to large-n quantitative analysis, focusing on 39 parties in 34 European countries from 1990 to 2008. It uses the ‘supply and demand’ conceptual framework developed for radical right parties to identify a number of socio-economic, political-cultural and party-system variables in the external environment that might potentially affect RLP support. The article finds the most persuasive variables to include political culture (past party success), the level of unemployment, Euroscepticism and anti-globalization sentiment, the electoral threshold and competition from Green and radical right parties. The findings suggest several avenues for future research and provide a framework that can be adapted to explain the electoral success of other party families.
Proponents of the European project often portray further enlargement of the European Union as a complement to the process of building an ever closer union. The eurozone crisis, however, has highlighted the risks associated with pursuing deeper integration in a diverse union and reignited the debate on differentiated integration. This contribution examines how public attitudes towards the processes of deepening and broadening are related and asks whether European citizens see them as complementary or conflicting. Using multilevel analysis of Eurobarometer data, the contribution examines the factors – individual and contextual – that shape attitudes towards enlargement and deeper political integration across the 27 member states. The findings suggest that the ‘winners’ of integration – high-skilled individuals in core eurozone countries – are most likely to support deepening, but oppose further enlargement out of fear that an ever wider union might be costly.
In this contribution, we focus on the role of euro-scepticism on radical right-wing voting in national elections in 18 European countries between 2002 and 2008. We do so with multilevel modelling taking advantage of high-quality cross-national European data. First, we focus on social cleavages related to voting, e.g. social class and religiosity. Second, we examine the effects of several contextual characteristics, of which some are classical and others new. Third, we take diverse socio-political attitudes into account. We test whether euro-scepticism affects voting for the radical right, over and beyond other determinants that have previously been proposed to determine radical right-wing voting. We find evidence that euro-scepticism indeed contributes to the explanation of voting for the radical right beyond perceived ethnic threat and political distrust. At the same time euro-scepticism is much less relevant than perceived ethnic threat in explaining why particular social categories, i.e. lower educated people, manual workers, unemployed people and non-churchgoers are more likely to vote for the radical right.
The current debate on the role of regional politics in the Euro pean Union (EU) is dominated by approaches that focus upon either intergovernmental bargaining or multi-level govern ance. Because Structural Funds are the main EU-wide redis tributive policy, we propose to apply the traditional literature on partisan politics and national redistribution to the case of the EU. We use a new data set on both the distribution of Structural Funds across regions and the distribution of vote shares for different factions of the European Parliament. These data provide empirical details for some of the partisan competition that takes place at the regional level. Specifically, we show that the traditional left vs. right cleavage can have an impact on the size of regional transfers.
This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theorizing on public opinion on European integration. We test theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter is stronger than the former. We theorize how the political consequences of identity are contested and shaped - that is to say, politically cued - in national contexts. The more national elites are divided, the more citizens are cued to oppose European integration, and this effect is particularly pronounced among citizens who see themselves as exclusively national. A model that synthesizes economic, identity, and cue theory explains around one-quarter of variation at the individual level and the bulk of variation at the national and party levels.
During the 1990s, the working class has become the core clientele of right-wing populist parties in Western Europe. This article empirically examines the motives of workers for supporting a right-wing populist party. Based on data from the European Social Survey for Austria, Belgium, France, Norway, and Switzerland, three different sets of explanations are tested: (1) hypotheses stressing economic determinants, that is, the fear of wage pressure and competition over welfare benefits; (2) hypotheses emphasizing cultural determinants, that is, the perception of immigration as a threat to national identity; and (3) hypotheses focusing on social alienation, that is, dissatisfaction with the way the country's democracy works and the nonintegration into intermediary networks (trade unions). We find questions of community and identity to be clearly more important than economic grievances. Hence, in Austria and Switzerland, the electoral success of right-wing populist parties among workers seems primarily due to cultural protectionism: the defense of national identity against outsiders. In Belgium, France, and Norway, cultural protectionism is complemented by deep-seated discontent with the way the countries' democracies work.
Public attitudes towards the European Union (EU) are at the heart of a growing body of research. The nature, structure and antecedents of these attitudes, however, are in need of conceptual and empirical refinement. With growing diversification of the policies of the Union, a one-dimensional approach to attitudes towards the EU may be insufficient. This study reviews existing approaches towards theorizing EU public opinion. Based on this inventory, originally collected public opinion survey data (n = 1394) indicate the presence of five dimensions of EU attitudes: performance, identity, affection, utilitarianism and strengthening. The study furthermore shows that different predictors of EU public opinion matter to differing extents when explaining these dimensions. In light of these findings, we suggest tightening the link, conceptually and empirically, between attitudinal dimensions and their antecedents.
We use Bayesian Model Averaging (BMA) to evaluate the robustness of determinants of economic growth in a new dataset of 255 European regions in the 1995-2005 period. We use three different specifications based on (1) the cross-section of regions, (2) the cross-section of regions with country fixed effects and (3) the cross-section of regions with a spatial autoregressive (SAR) structure. We investigate the existence of parameter heterogeneity by allowing for interactions of potential explanatory variables with geographical dummies as extra regressors. We find remarkable differences between the determinants of economic growth implied by differences between regions and those within regions of a given country. In the cross-section of regions, we find evidence for conditional convergence with speed around two percent. The convergence process between countries is dominated by the catching up process of regions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), whereas convergence within countries is mostly a characteristic of regions in old EU member states. We also find robust evidence of positive growth of capital cities, a highly educated workforce and a negative effect of population density.
The evidence presented in this article suggests that EU regional support has a significant and positive impact on the growth performance of European regions. Moreover, there are signs of a change in the impact of this support in the 1990s, indicating that the major reform of the structural funds undertaken in 1988 may have succeeded in making EU regional policy more effective. However, the results also indicate that the economic effects of such support are much stronger in more developed environments, emphasizing the importance of accompanying policies that improve the competence of the receiving environments. Copyright Blackwell Publishing Ltd 2003.
The mass political economy literature concentrates on egocentric and sociotropic evaluations of short-term economic performance. Scant attention is paid to other economic concerns people mayhave. In a neo-liberal economic climate characterized by a downsized labor market and the retrenchment of government welfare entitlements, one such widely-publicized concern is job insecurity. This article shows that job insecurityisanovel form of discontent that is independent of the retrospective evaluations of short-term performance that are the stu# of the mainstream mass political economy literature. At the same time, the political e#ects of job insecurity are distinctive. In a multinomial probit model of electoral choice in the 1996 U.S. presidential election, job insecurity is associated with support for the third-party candidate, Ross Perot, but, contrary to conventional wisdom, has no implications for turnout. Traditional retrospectiveevaluations of economic performance explain the major-pa...
The 2014 European elections led to a sharp rise in the electoral consensus of parties and independent parliament members perceived as eurosceptic. This paper analyzes the interconnections between distressed economies and the electoral success of hard-line eurosceptic parties. On a panel of 108 elections between 2008 and 2015, the random-effects model shows the relative effect of long- and short-term political trust, economic performance indicators, and institutional variables in determining the rise of hard-line eurosceptic parties. In contrast with previous studies, which have tended to de-emphasize the effect of economic performance in determining the success of eurosceptic forces, the results of this paper detect both a direct and a mediated effect of the economic crisis on the electoral success of hard-line eurosceptic parties.
Extensive research suggests that political factors bias the domestic allocation of the European Structural and Investment Funds (SIF) in ways that may not be in line with EU goals. This article offers the first systematic and comparative analysis of the role of electoral institutions in shaping county-level allocations of SIF. Drawing on theories of distributive politics and federalism, this article argues that electoral institutions provide politicians in the executive branch of national government with incentives to use at least a part of the SIF to buy votes in NUTS 3-level counties, whereby vote-buying is more common under majority voting than under proportional representation. The results of a statistical analysis of SIF allocations across 202 Italian and French NUTS 3-level counties during 2007–13 confirm this argument. The article concludes by discussing the findings and their implications for future research on EU budgetary implementation and cohesion policy.
This study tries to explain regional level variation in the far right-wing vote across more than 160 regions in 17 Western European countries from 1990 to 2013. With the help of a panel Tobit model, I first examine the impact of nine regional-level structural indicators on the dependent variable, the percentage of the far right-wing vote. I find that the far right performs better in territorial units with a high percentage of university-educated individuals, in rural regions and in areas that have a high percentage of foreigners. Second, I use a dynamic specification in first differences to evaluate how changes in the independent variables trigger changes in the dependent variable. The results of this second specification highlight that increases in unemployment rates and in the number of college-educated citizens trigger a better performance of the far right.
In Western European democracies opposition to the European Union is commonly found at the ideological extremes. Yet, the Euroscepticism of radical left-wing and radical right-wing parties has been shown to have distinct roots and manifestations. The article investigates whether these differences are mirrored at the citizen level. Using data from the European Election Study (2009/2014) and the European Social Survey (2008/2012) in 15 West European countries, it is found that left-wing and right-wing citizens not only differ in the object of their Euroscepticism, but also in their motivations for being sceptical of the EU. Left-wing Eurosceptics are dissatisfied with the current functioning of the EU, but do not oppose further European integration per se, while right-wing Eurosceptics categorically reject European integration. Euroscepticism among left-wing citizens is motivated by economic and cultural concerns, whereas for right-wing citizens Euroscepticism is solely anchored in cultural attitudes. These results refine the common ‘horseshoe’ understanding of ideology and Euroscepticism.
This book addresses two questions - why some political systems have more centralized systems of interpersonal redistribution than others, and why some political unions make larger efforts to equalize resources among their constituent units than others. This book presents a new theory of the origin of fiscal structures in systems with several levels of government. The argument points to two major factors to account for the variation in redistribution: the interplay between economic geography and political representation on the one hand, and the scope of interregional economic externalities on the other. To test the empirical implications derived from the argument, the book relies on in-depth studies of the choice of fiscal structures in unions as diverse as the European Union, Canada and the United States in the aftermath of the Great Depression; Germany before and after Reunification; and Spain after the transition to democracy.
Radical left parties (RLP) have been significant actors in many Western European party systems since the expansion of mass democracy. In some cases, they have been very relevant forces in terms of popular support. Despite this fact, they have not received a great deal of attention in past decades from a comparative perspective. Through examination of the role of an important set of factors, this article provides, for the first time, a cross-national empirical account of the variation in voting for RLPs across Western Europe, based on individual-level data. It evaluates the effect of key socio-demographic and attitudinal individual-level variables on the RLP vote. The findings point to the continuing relevance of some social and political factors traditionally associated with votes for RLPs, and to the relevance of attitudinal variables.
How does labour market disadvantage translate into political behaviour? Bringing together the literatures on political alienation,
redistribution preferences and insider-outsider politics, we identify three mechanisms by which labour market disadvantages
influence voting behaviour. Disadvantages can increase support for redistribution, reduce internal political efficacy or lower
external political efficacy. This translates into support for pro-redistribution parties, vote abstention or support for protest
parties. Using the Dutch LISS survey, we observe a twin effect of increased support for redistribution and decreased external
efficacy. Mediated through redistributive preferences, we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on voting for
left parties. Mediated through external efficacy we find a positive effect of labour market disadvantage on protest voting.
In contrast, we do not find any effect of labour market disadvantage on internal efficacy. Hence, the observed effect of labour
market disadvantage on political abstention is entirely mediated by external efficacy.
Theory: Theories of how domestic politics influence international economic policy differ fundamentally in their treatment of the mass public. A central issue in this controversy is whether members of the mass public form attitudes about international economics that reflect their economic interests. This article examines this assumption using international economic theory to identify variation in economic interests regarding international economic policy. Hypotheses: Citizens of the European Union (EU) form attitudes toward EU membership-an international economic policy-that are consistent with their occupation-based economic interests. Methods: Individual-level heteroskedastic ordered probit analysis of Eurobarometer survey data and OECD economic statistics from 1975 to 1992. Results: While controlling for a variety of potentially confounding factors, the likelihood of positive evaluations of EU membership is positively related to intraoccupational differences in economic benefits from EU membership.
This article asks whether the trend towards greater inequality in European countries has led to an increase in euroscepticism.
Traditionally amongst the most equal societies, West European countries have recently witnessed a stark increase in income
inequality. European integration is often presented as one of the main driving factors of this development. This raises the
question whether Europeans blame the EU for the widening gap between the rich and the poor, and consequently develop eurosceptic
attitudes. A multilevel analysis of 79 pooled Eurobarometer survey waves across 12 countries from 1975 to 2009 confirms that
increasing income inequality boosts euroscepticism especially amongst the low educated. The findings are consistent with previous
research on the link between income inequality and democratic legitimacy. They also provide empirical support for a new educational
divide in the wake of European integration and globalisation, and deepen our knowledge on the predictors of EU support.
The European Union budget is distributed primarily in the form of intergovernmental grants to sub-state governments, which invest the grants in local projects. Transfers are allocated under the auspices of the European structural funds. This article assesses the causal links between electoral incentives on the recipient side, European funding goals, and local grant allocation. Tobit regressions of the allocation patterns in 419 local districts in Germany for the period 2000–6 suggest the following: although recipient sub-state governments enjoy substantial discretion in selecting projects, their distributive choices are largely in accord with European goals. As theoretically predicted, however, there is robust evidence that sub-state governments’ electoral concerns distort the local allocation of structural funds.
All regions of the European Community, including purely administrative ones, are examined to see how far their aggregate party votes differ from those cast across the state as a whole. Considerable differences emerge both between regions themselves and between regions and the state in which they are embedded. While these are not exclusively related to voting for a minority Nationalist party, this is a major element in voting distinctiveness. Structural factors promoting distinctiveness in general are employment in agriculture, unemployment and (more weakly) regional GDP. Factors influencing minority nationalist voting in the regions where it exists are employment in industry, unemployment and (overwhelmingly) the presence of a regional language.
This paper asks what explains similar Eurosceptic positions between radical right and radical left parties. In answering this question, it focuses on the paradoxical role of nationalism as an integral part of the discourse of both radical right and radical left wing parties. Although these two party families differ in terms of origins, transnational links and policy and although nationalism is usually associated with parties of the right in the literature, this paper argues that in fact nationalism cuts across party lines and is associated with both party families’ opposition to European integration. In order to test our argument, we employ a mixed methods approach. First, we use a new dataset from the 2009 Euromanifestos Project (EMP), which coded party manifestos. We have isolated questions that refer to nationalism and European integration and examine broad policy parallels between the two party families across Europe. Second, we apply the findings from the quantitative analysis on Greece and France as two countries with a strong presence of both radical right and radical left small parties.
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.
The European Union's (EU) management of globalization includes redistributing or compensating for distributional consequences of globalization, using policies at different levels of governance (national, regional-European and supra-European). This contribution analyzes the extent and politics of such redistributive management. It emphasizes how redistributive management is meaningful and very popular, though less developed than EU policies setting the level and terms of openness. In addition, it suggests how EU policies that manage globalization through redistribution or other mechanisms and that operate at different levels of governance are causally interconnected. Existing national and EU policies of redistribution have strong but uneven effects for EU protections setting the level of openness. And national-level welfare provisions and EU redistributive policies, like the Structural Funds, sometimes undermine and sometimes reinforce one another. Case examples and analysis of public opinion develop these claims.
This article investigates citizen support for welfare provisions, where these can be provided at both the national and the EU level. The guiding question is whether welfare provisions at one level dampen, increase or have little effect on support for assistance at the other level. Analysis of data on support for national and EU-level welfare assistance suggests only one-way tension between governance levels: generous national welfare may modestly diminish support for EU-level welfare assistance, as well as the degree to which economic insecurities encourage such support; but the currently meagre EU-level Structural Funds and other transfers have little effect on support for national compensation. This analysis clarifies the possibilities and dilemmas of welfare compensation where governance is multi-level in character.
In a multilevel system like the European Union (EU), social conflicts are defined and conceived mainly in territorial categories. As a result, the disparities between Eastern and Western Europe may give rise to additional transfer payments or even endanger further enlargements of the EU. The acuteness of this trilemma of enlargement, increased political cooperation and budgetary neutrality can be lessened either by a quick convergence of Eastern and Western performance levels, or by the differentiation of the regional employment and income situation in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). The capital regions and the Western border regions in Central Europe are developing dynamically. Consequently, one can expect to see a relatively durable prosperity gap between Eastern and Western Europe, as well as increased regional differentiation within CEE. These differentiation processes could be a first step in transforming the definition of inequalities and interests into territorial and non-territorial forms of social inequalities. However, the relative stability of the European centre– periphery structure does not allow for the ‘de-territorialization’ of social relationships. Instead, there is evidence of a non-identical, path-dependent reproduction of long-established disparities.
The Structural Funds of the European Union have proved to be blunt policy instruments in serving their stated purpose of enhancing both economic and social cohesion. Cohesion policy is embedded in a context of inter-governmental bargaining on budgetary allocations which structures the core of the policy around the yardstick of GDP per capita. This complicates the targeting of the funds on real deprivation. Moreover, a pork barrel logic in policy implementation favours better organized and advantaged groups within regions. This situation, as well as the growing saliency of inequality issues at EU level, have raised concern with the question of 'who benefits?' from cohesion policy.The European Commission, some member states and local actors are responding by developing efforts to tackle deprivation as experienced by EU citizens locally. However, they face important constraints in doing so, which raises broader questions about political representation and access to decision-making in the Union.
Much of the research on the European Community focuses on elites and institutions and as a result downplays the importance of the mass public in determining the direction of European integration. A common justification for this viewpoint is that members of the public provide a stable reservoir of strong support for European integration. Recent political events, however, raise doubts about this depiction of a ‘passive public’. Consequently, there is a need for a fuller understanding of European attitudes. We specify a number of hypotheses dealing with the effects of international trade interests, security concerns, and demographic characteristics on cross-national and cross-sectional variations in public support for European integration. Using Eurobarometer surveys and OECD data on EC trade from 1973–1989, we investigate these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional model. Our statistical results reveal that an individual's level of support is positively related to her nation's security and trade interests in EC membership and her personal potential to benefit from liberalized markets for goods, labour, and money.
This document provides a list of substantive errata for the book. This typically means an error or problem of some importance to the substance of the discussion. Erratum (1) In the discussion of figure 2.2 says that one should use the "square root" to model the adjective "very" and that one should use the "square" to model the adjective "some-what." These should be flipped: one should use the square for "very" and the square root for "somewhat." Figure 2.2 shows this correctly. Erratum (2) Following a discussion with David Collier I think the whole section in chapter, pp. 80–83, dealing with Collier and Levitsky should be rewritten. The text below then replaces that section. Note also that the caption of figure 3.1 should read "Ladder of generality versus diminished subtypes" as in the original figure in Collier and Levitsky.
Regional economic inequalities are increasing in most of the European Union (EU) member states, while between-nation inequalities
in the enlarged Europe are declining in the last years. The economic differences between East and West Europe are gradually
diminishing and the EU is becoming a relatively homogeneous economic, legal, and political field, which promotes social and
economic cohesion in Europe (at a rate of approximately 2 per cent per year). Most of the regional economic inequalities are
already inequalities within nations. The economic and income inequalities in the enlarged EU can be largely explained by different
regional employment patterns, industrial structures and the region's location within the European space: central urban regions
with a good research and traffic infrastructure, qualified employees, a high employment rate and knowledge-intensive services
are the best predictors for high income levels. The slow convergence process in the enlarged EU may not increase popular support
for the European integration process because the most important frame of reference is still the nation-state where regional
inequalities are increasing.
This paper analyzes the evolution of per capita income inequality among 197 European regions between 1977 and 2003, and seeks
evidence of the relationship between the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) and interregional income inequality. The
conclusion is that overall interregional income inequality has decreased since 1977, owing to a decrease in between-country
inequality. The panel analysis conducted in this paper suggests that the adoption of the common currency has, thus far, exacerbated
regional inequality in poorer EU countries, while it has not significantly affected regional inequality within richer countries.
Inequality in less advanced countries has also increased with the establishment of the convergence criteria and with the implementation
of the Single Market.
KeywordsIncome inequality-European Union-European integration-EMU-Regional disparities
The European Union (EU) provides grants to disadvantaged regions of member states to allow them to catch up with the EU average. Under the Objective 1 scheme, NUTS2 regions with a per capita GDP level below 75% of the EU average qualify for structural funds transfers from the central EU budget. This rule gives rise to a regression-discontinuity design that exploits the discrete jump in the probability of EU transfer receipt at the 75% threshold for identification of causal effects of Objective 1 treatment on outcome such as economic growth of EU regions. We find positive per capita GDP growth effects of Objective 1 transfers, but no employment growth effects.
The allocation of Structural Funds, the most important component of the European Union (EU) cohesion policy, is subject to intense bargaining between national governments and across layers of political governance. Using Structural Funds data for each cohesion objective over 1989-99, we examine which variables, economic and political, determine the actual funds allocation. We test our hypotheses with a Tobit model that accounts for the two-stage allocation process and our limited dependent variables. Our results indicate that economic criteria are not the only determinants of funds allocation. Indeed, we find that the political situation within a country and a region and the relations between various layers of governance influence the allocation process. This article is also the only study to measure the impact of additional funds provided by the region or the country itself, and to differentiate the analysis by cohesion objective. Copyright (c) 2010 The Author(s). Journal compilation (c) 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
- Kriesi H.
Citizens' Awareness and Perceptions of EU Regional Policy
European Commission. (2014) Citizens' Awareness and Perceptions of EU Regional Policy,
wave 3 (Flash Eurobarometer 384), Brussels: European Union.
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King, G., Keohane, R.O. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry. Scientific Inference
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