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Bailout Countries and Others in 2014: Austerity and Government Defection

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The Eurosceptic 2014 European Parliament Elections

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics ((PSEUP))

Abstract

The notion that domestic responses to financial crises are constrained in a way that limits the options available to national governments is not new. However, the European Parliamentary (EP) term that ended in 2014 was a period when this reality was brought home to European electorates with previously unseen potency. This study explores the implications of this for the logic of voting in the 2014 EP elections. Defection from government parties in EP elections is known to result from a combination of sincere/ideological and performance/protest voting logics. However, this study argues that fiscal tightening policies functioned, in the most affected countries, as a signal leading voters to discount the ideological positions of parties and to behave mostly under a purely protest logic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Deepa Babington, “Italy parliament gives final approval to austerity plan.” Reuters, 14 September 2011. Found at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/09/14/us-italy-austerity-idUSTRE78C7NF20110914

  2. 2.

    Jan Cienski, “Fico: austerity rules.” Beyondbrics, 23 May 2012: Available at: http://blogs.ft.com/beyond-brics/2012/05/23/fico-austerity-rules/

  3. 3.

    Marcin Goettig and Pawel Sobczak, “Poland, eyeing euro crisis, launches austerity drive.” Reuters, 18 November 2011. Available at: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/18/us-poland-government-idUSTRE7AH21H20111118; Rae (2012).

  4. 4.

    See also Reif (1985), van der Eijket al. (1996) and Marsh (1998) for discussions about this and other patterns of the relationship between government losses and the electoral cycle.

  5. 5.

    See Table 10.3 in the appendix for the list of those parties by country.

  6. 6.

    Source: Carnot and de Castro (2015). We lack data for Croatia.

  7. 7.

    For the purpose of determining whether a cabinet is in the “honeymoon” period thus defined, in cases where a new cabinet has taken office but with the same Prime Minister (PM) as before, we consider the moment when that PM took office for the first time following an election. We also checked whether employing an alternative measurement for this variable—the number of days since the new cabinet has taken office, from 15 (Hungary) to 1454 (UK)—changed the fundamental results of the analyses we conducted in any way, and it does not. All results available from the author.

  8. 8.

    On a four-point scale measuring at what age full-time education was stopped, from 1 (no full-time education) to 4 (20 years or more).

  9. 9.

    On a 10-point scale of self-perceived position in the “social staircase.”

  10. 10.

    A dummy variable for voters who identify with a party in the government. Although Greece and Cyprus also have compulsory voting, it is not strictly enforced.

  11. 11.

    On a four-point scale from 1 (“No, not at all”) to 4 (“Yes, totally”).

  12. 12.

    A model where only the Left–Right Distance main term is estimated yields a positive but far from statistically significant coefficient for the model of switching, and a negative and not significant coefficient for the model of abstaining.

  13. 13.

    At the time of the EP 2014 election, only in Lithuania (TT-LDP: Order and Justice—Liberal Democratic Party) and Latvia (ZZS: Union of Greens and Farmers) were eurosceptic parties included in government coalitions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Lisbon, Lisboa, Portugal

    Pedro C. Magalhães

Authors
  1. Pedro C. Magalhães
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Julie Hassing Nielsen

  2. European University Institute, Florence, Italy

    Mark N. Franklin

Appendix

Appendix

Table 10.3 Parties in government at the time of the 2014 European Parliament elections
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Magalhães, P.C. (2017). Bailout Countries and Others in 2014: Austerity and Government Defection. In: Hassing Nielsen, J., Franklin, M. (eds) The Eurosceptic 2014 European Parliament Elections. Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-58696-4_10

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