Voting for Eurosceptic Parties and Societal Polarization in the Aftermath of the European Sovereign Debt Crisis

Abstract

Abstract The question of whether people voting for Eurosceptic parties in almost every European country is simply a democratic way of expressing a political opinion, or if it presents a threat to democracy by giving a voice to Eurosceptic parties that challenge the EU in a populist manner, has not lost its currency since the 2008 European sovereign dept crisis. In fact, at the first glance, the situation of anti-Corona protestors in Canada or Germany seems comparable. But contrary to some scholars, I argue that it was the economic crisis that first visualized the interdependency of the EU members to the citizens, and was, therefore, the ideal setting for populists to create an atmosphere of mistrust, with the help of the media in some countries. This Research Note addresses the undertheorized link between populism and crisis, by developing a theoretical model focussing on the aggregate level, which shows that EU-membership duration is a crucial factor in explaining voting for Eurosceptic parties. I use data from the European Social Survey and compare a period from 2002 to 2016, conducting trend analysis and difference-in-difference-estimation. My analysis reveals that Eurosceptic parties are more successful in those countries, where anti-EU protest has already been established before. In addition, I find a delayed crisis effect. This could be important for our understanding of the current Covid-19-crisis, which is a health crisis in first place, but a threat to democratic values and instrumentalized by populists as well.