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The economic determinants of party support for European integration

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Abstract

Parties and their elites play an important role in shaping public opinion towards European integration. As determinants of party support for European integration, the literature has identified ideological and strategic electoral motives. In this article, we examine the impact of economic factors on party support for European integration. We find that party support from right-wing parties is larger in countries with greater financial benefits from the EU budget. On the contrary, benefits from trade creation by the introduction of the euro as a common currency show no significant influence on party support. In the period after the introduction of the euro, we find that right-wing parties were much more Euro-sceptical than left-wing parties when their country did not fulfil the Maastricht debt or deficit criteria. We also observe more support for European integration by left-wing parties in countries that would benefit from welfare state convergence due to European integration. While our analysis indicates that different economic factors always have been important to explain party support for European integration, we also find that, in the period after the financial crisis in 2008, these motives have gained importance at the expense of the ideological motives.

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Notes

  1. Other examples in which countries have renounced to economic competencies are the foundation of supra-state institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). How the creation of supranational institutions has limited the influence of parties in OECD countries on social expenditure, for example, has been analysed recently by Herwartz and Theilen (2014).

  2. See Pew Research Center (2013), a summary of the 2013 Spring Pew Global Attitudes Survey.

  3. Of course, economic factors are also related with ideological party positions and, therefore, to some extent also implicitly considered in previous studies. Moreover, recent studies on the effects of the Eurozone crisis have shown that economic factors are more and more determinant for voting behaviour in the European parliament (Braghiroli 2015; Otjes and Van der Veer 2016).

  4. The role of supranational institutional change on the influence of party ideology on social expenditure has recently been analysed by Herwartz and Theilen (2014). They find that, indeed, the creation of supranational institutions has limited the influence of parties on social spending in the OECD during the last two decades.

  5. See Bakker et al. (2012), Hooghe et al. (2010), Polk et al. (2017) and Ray (1999) for more details on the Chapel Hill Expert Survey and the distribution of parties over countries and years.

  6. The inverted U-form can be estimated with a second-order polynomial: \(European\_Integration=\beta _{0}+\beta _{1}Ideology+\beta _{2}\left( Ideology\right) ^{2}\), where \(\beta _{1}>0\) and \(\beta _{2}<0\). Notice that support for European integration has its maximum at \(Ideology=-\beta _{1}/(2\beta _{2})\) and, by definition, support by an extreme left-wing party is \(\beta _{0}\) and by an extreme right-wing party is \(\beta _{0}+10\left( \beta _{1} + 10\beta _{2}\right)\).

  7. We have also used Government participation, a dummy that takes value one for parties that are in office during the year of the survey, 0.5 (for both outgoing parties and entering parties) if there is a change of government in the survey year, and 0 otherwise. This measurement is different from Marks et al. (2002) whose variable takes value one when a party has participated in government at least once in the period 1965–1995. Furthermore, similar to Hellström (2008), we have used Electoral Support which is measured as a party’s share of total votes in the last national parliamentary elections before the survey year in percentage points. As all these variables are highly correlated with Mainstream Party, we use them alternatively to check the robustness of hypothesis 1. The results are rather similar and available from the authors.

  8. We also include in EU Net Expenditure transfers from the EU to Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia before these countries were EU members.

  9. Notice that measuring trade as a share of GDP automatically accounts for business cycle fluctuations.

  10. The estimated effects of EMU-induced trade are in line with the predictions of the gravity model. Thus, trade benefits are highest for centrally located and large economies (Germany), medium for small centrally located economies (Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands) and large but more peripheral economies (France, Italy, Spain) and almost non-existent for small peripheral countries (Finland, Greece, Ireland, Portugal). Furthermore, for a control group of EMU non-member countries (Denmark, Sweden, UK), there are no effects of EMU-induced trade.

  11. As an alternative measure, we use simultaneous non-compliance of the debt and deficit criteria which yields similar results available from the authors.

  12. Using Government Participation as an alternative measure of strategic electoral motives of party support for European integration, we find similar results. Support for European integration of parties with government participation is between 0.4 and 1.3 points larger than the support of parties that are in opposition. The detailed results are available upon request from the authors.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Miquel Manjón Antolín, Luís Díaz Serrano, Helmut Herwartz and Oscar Martínez Ibáñez for their comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación under projects ECO2010-17113, ECO2010-19733, ECO2013- 42884-P and ECO2016-75410-P is gratefully acknowledged.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, Lancaster University Management School, Lancaster, LA1 4YX, UK

    Patricia Esteve-González

  2. Departament d’Economia and CREIP, Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Reus, 43204, Spain

    Bernd Theilen

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  1. Patricia Esteve-González
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  2. Bernd Theilen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Patricia Esteve-González.

Appendix

Appendix

Data processing

Parties’ Electoral Support and Government Participation for 2010 and 2014 are from our own data. Some data about parties’ ideology are missing in some survey years. We assumed that their position on general ideology is equal to their ideology quote in the closest survey year. Because of missing information, 54 observations on parties were not included in our sample. As GINI indexes are rather time invariant, they are not collected annually in all countries and, thus, there is no information for all years to report Inequality. To prevent the loss of more observations, we estimate missing data by taking the average of the two closest observations in time (see Tables 2, 3).

Table 2 Data definitions and sources
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Table 3 Descriptive statistics
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Esteve-González, P., Theilen, B. The economic determinants of party support for European integration. Acta Polit 53, 348–366 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41269-017-0055-z

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