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What ‘Moves’ Party Systems in Times of Crisis?

Economic Conditions, Public Opinion and Party Competition on European Integration

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Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe

Part of the book series: Politische Vierteljahresschrift Sonderhefte ((PVS))

Abstract

The Euro crisis has considerably altered party competition across Europe. By adopting a party-system perspective this contribution analyses to what extent the Euro crisis has ‘moved’ party systems to more Eurosceptic positions and whether it has affected the systemic salience of the European integration issue. We argue that worsening economic conditions have directly affected party competition on European integration, but that party systems have additionally adapted to a more Eurosceptic public opinion in many EU member states. Connecting national parties’ election manifestos for European Parliament elections to survey data and macro-economic indicators, our empirical analysis shows that changes in party competition on European integration in EU member states between 2009 and 2014 can be explained by both factors. In the economically most affected countries, party systems have become more Eurosceptic—both as a direct reaction to economic hardship and as an indirect response to an increased public dissatisfaction with the regime of the EU. Moreover, an increase in the systemic salience of the European integration issue has occurred mainly in creditor countries, where the public has become more Eurosceptic regarding the idea and the continuing process of European unification.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-27559714 (accessed on 20/09/16).

  2. 2.

    Even though we are exclusively focusing on the economic consequences of the Euro crisis on European party systems in EP elections (see Hernández and Kriesi (2016a) for a focus on the economic consequences on party competition at the national level), we acknowledge that right-wing Eurosceptic parties in particular partly campaigned on anti-immigration issues. However, both right-wing Eurosceptic parties and their respective voters associated these anti-immigration stances with a strong resistance towards any redistributive measures for the benefit of economically hard-hit countries (Hobolt 2015; Mudde 2017b, p. 414). Only from 2015 onwards, i.e. since “Europe’s annus horribilis”, have far-right parties benefited from voters’ anti-immigration and especially anti-Muslim feelings electorally, for example in Eastern Europe (Mudde 2017a, p. 259 emphasis in original), but predominantly at the national and not at the European level (Mudde 2017b, p. 418).

  3. 3.

    There is a particularly lively scholarly debate on how to measure fragmentation (e.g. Golosov 2010; Laakso and Taagepera 1979), polarisation (e.g. Curini and Hino 2012; Dalton 2008) and volatility (e.g. Casal Bértoa et al. 2017; Marinova 2015; Pedersen 1979; Powell and Tucker 2014) of party systems.

  4. 4.

    However, party positions on central issues such as European integration are often strongly influenced by their core ideological profile (Marks and Wilson 2000). Moreover, parties are ‘conservative organizations’ (Harmel and Janda 1994, p. 265) that only reluctantly change their policy positions in a fundamental manner. Therefore, party positions are generally stable over time (Dalton 2016; Dalton and McAllister 2015).

  5. 5.

    Mainstream parties can react to these parties in two possible ways. When the issue in question allows them to attract new voters, they also tend to emphasise this issue and often adjust their own position on this issue. However, when the issue is owned (see e.g. Hobolt and de Vries 2015; Petrocik 1996) by the niche party and is not a positional but rather a valence issue (Stokes 1963), then mainstream parties try to de-emphasise this issue since they cannot gain anything from politicising it (Abou-Chadi 2016).

  6. 6.

    Note, however, that although the theoretical expectations are on the party system level, they are partly rooted in individual parties’ incentives for shifting policy positions on and increasing the salience of European integration issues.

  7. 7.

    Kopecký and Mudde (2002) not only distinguish between these two different objects of support but also connect them to two different modes of support. More specifically, they characterise support for the general idea of European unification as ‘diffuse support’ for European integration. In contrast, they label support for “the EU as it is and as it is developing” (Kopecký and Mudde 2002, p. 300) as ‘specific support’ for European integration (see also Krouwel and Abts 2007). Yet we refrain from using this terminology in this paper since we are only interested in the distinction between the two attitudinal objects, not in a discussion about their respective modes.

  8. 8.

    In fact, the findings of Kuhn and Stoeckel (2014, p. 637) suggest that ‘people in economically healthy member states are afraid that European economic governance may harm their economy, while people in crisis-ridden countries welcome it’, which is also corroborated by other studies (Bechtel et al. 2014; Daniele and Geys 2015).

  9. 9.

    Our analyses comprise all current EU member states, except Croatia which has been a member state of the EU until July 2013.

  10. 10.

    Since we do not anticipate a uniform time trend in the regressor variables, we do not include a constant in the FD regression models.

  11. 11.

    Using expert survey data on national party positions on European integration would not provide us with comparable data for most of the EP elections because survey waves are not synchronised with EP elections, which might be one of the explanations for a discrepancy between expert judgments on parties’ shifts in European integration and parties’ shifts based on election manifesto content (Adams et al. 2014).

  12. 12.

    Unfortunately, Eurostat does not provide any data about these interest rates for Estonia. Consequently, we left this case out of all empirical analyses that use the combined Euro crisis indicator.

  13. 13.

    We are aware that in 2009 public opinion and parties’ draft election manifestos might have been influenced by the global financial and economic crisis. Yet we believe that, due to the greater socio-economic and political consequences for citizens, the Euro crisis affected citizens’ support for the EU much more strongly than the global financial crisis, and we follow Braun and Tausendpfund (2014) who insist on the necessity of distinguishing between the two crises.

  14. 14.

    Changes in unemployment rates and changes in interest rates: Pearson’s r = 0.84. Changes in unemployment rates and changes in annual GDP per capita: Pearson’s r = −0.72. Changes in interest rates and changes in annual GDP per capita: Pearson’s r = −0.74.

  15. 15.

    The possible answer options were “yes, totally” (1), “yes, somewhat” (0.67), “no, not really” (0.33) and “no, not at all” (0). “„Don’t know” answers have been omitted.

  16. 16.

    All empirical figures are based on the plotplain scheme in Stata version 15.1 (see Bischof 2017).

  17. 17.

    Note that the results of the models jointly including the economic indicator capturing the Euro crisis and changes in citizens’ regime support for the EU are only presented for reasons of transparency and must be interpreted very cautiously due to the aforementioned problem of multicollinearity.

  18. 18.

    Here, for example, the Eurosceptic positions of the Freedom Party of Austria (FPÖ) have been to some extent counterbalanced by the newly emerged pro-European party “The New Austria and Liberal Forum” (NEOS).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich, Munich, Germany

    Martin Gross

  2. University of Münster (WWU), Münster, Germany

    Constantin Schäfer

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  1. Martin Gross
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  2. Constantin Schäfer
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Correspondence to Martin Gross .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Politische Bildung Inland, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin, Germany

    Sebastian Bukow

  2. Universität Trier, Trier, Germany

    Uwe Jun

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Gross, M., Schäfer, C. (2020). What ‘Moves’ Party Systems in Times of Crisis?. In: Bukow, S., Jun, U. (eds) Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe. Politische Vierteljahresschrift Sonderhefte. Springer VS, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-28988-1_5

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