Party competition over EU integration: asymmetrical impacts of external shocks across regions?

Twan Huijsmans,André Krouwel

doi:10.1017/s1755773921000242

Abstract

AbstractUsing Voting Advice Application (VAA) data from the EU Profiler/euandi Trend File, we studied how parties’ positions towards European integration relate to their positions on other important issues, and how this varies across EP elections, and between European regions. We hypothesized that the association between parties’ EU-integration positions and their positions on other issues was affected by the three major crises that hit the European Union (EU) between 2009 and 2019: the economic, migration, and climate crises. Additionally, we hypothesized that the economic and migration crises asymmetrically affected the association between cultural and economic issues on the one hand and the EU dimension on the other across the EU’s three macro regions (NWE, SE, and CEE). Our results show that neither the economic crisis nor the migration crisis or the climate crisis had an EU-wide impact on how European integration relates to other issue dimensions. As we hypothesized, economic issues were particularly strongly linked to EU-integration positions in SE in 2014, but our results additionally indicated that the longstanding interpretation of EU integration as a mainly economic issue in SE diminished after the start of the migration crisis. Finally, EU integration became related to immigration issues in CEE while this is not the case in the other regions. The main takeaway is that EU integration is interpreted differently by parties across the EU, which is important to recognize for parties that seek to work together in transnational party groups, and for scholars that aim to understand EU policy making.

Highlights

In the European Parliament, national political parties from across the European continent form transnational party groups, which presupposes that its members occupy roughly the same corner of the political space or at least share some ideological traits
Where previous literature studied the impact of the economic crisis, we study the impact of the migration crisis that peaked after the EP 2014 elections
We studied how parties’ positions regarding European Union (EU) integration are related to their positions on other important issues, and to what extent this varies over time and across three European regions

Summary

Introduction

In the European Parliament, national political parties from across the European continent form transnational party groups, which presupposes that its members occupy roughly the same corner of the political space or at least share some ideological traits. An important task for members of the party groupings in the EP is to shape the direction of (further) European Union (EU) integration, which makes it crucial that members of transnational party groups interpret EU integration in similar ways. We study how parties’ positions towards European integration relate to their positions on other important issues, and how this varies across EP elections, and between European regions. We find that European integration is understood and interpreted differently by parties across the EU. The longstanding interpretation of EU integration as a mainly economic issue in Southern Europe diminished after the peak of the migration crisis, and EU integration is related to immigration issues in Central-Eastern Europe while this is not the case in the other regions

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Conclusion