EU issue voting in European member states: the return of the pro-EU voter

2024/07/30 by Luca Carrieri, Nicolò Conti, Matthew Loveless · 1 voice · 2 citations
Social Sciences · #Electoral Systems and Political Participation #European Union Policy and Governance #Populism, Right-Wing Movements

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/01402382.2024.2370121

openalex publication_date 2024/07/30 · openalex created_date 2024/07/31 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/23

Abstract

In the member states of the European Union (EU), there are increasing signs of waning EU support, particularly in the form of anti-EU sentiment and voting. Yet, the salient role of pro-EU voting has not been side-lined entirely. Using a combination of data from EES and CHES that estimates the positional distance between voters and parties on the EU, the results suggest that voters are significantly mobilised on support for the EU. This is congruent to recent evidence that has shown that voters have rewarded parties with more polarised stances on the EU and, contrary to Eurosceptic party mobilisation, those parties with a more extreme pro-EU stance. Here, the more vocal a Europhile party, the more likely that citizens will vote for that party given their positional closeness to the EU. The findings in this article suggest the (re-) emergence of an EU dimension with mobilising effects on parties and voters and serious consequences for the dynamics of party competition.

Citations

• The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?
• A Postfunctionalist Theory of European Integration: From Permissive Consensus to Constraining Dissensus
• Globalization and the transformation of the national political space: Six European countries compared
• Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, with a 1980 Case Study
• The Politicization of European Integration
• The Causal Effect of Radical Right Success on Mainstream Parties’ Policy Positions: A Regression Discontinuity Approach
• Indifferent and Eurosceptic: The motivations of EU-only abstainers in the 2019 European Parliament election

Cited by

• Less second-order, more Europeanised? The 2024 European Parliament election in Spain
• “Don’t Know, Don’t Care?” How information and institutional reform affect voting in supranational elections: experimental evidence from the 2024 European Parliamentary elections

Discussions

• Luca Carrieri, Nicolò Conti & Matthew Loveless show that voters are significantly mobilized on the 🇪🇺. Voters have especially rewarded parties with more pronounced stances on the 🇪🇺. doi.org/10.1 [bsky, 2 points, 0 comments]

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