Differentiated party response: The effect of Euroskeptic public opinion on party positions

Abstract

Do parties respond to voters' preferences on European integration in elections to the European Parliament? In this article, we argue that political parties do respond to voters' Euroskeptic attitudes, but that party type conditions responsiveness. In particular, we posit that larger parties are more responsive and that governing parties are less responsive to aggregate Euroskepticism. To test our theoretical expectations, we use data from the Euromanifestos Project and European Election Study from 1989 to 2009 for 252 parties across 26 European Union Member States. Our findings have important implications for understanding democratic representation in the European Union and the second-order nature of elections to the European Parliament.

Moderate as Necessary: The Role of Electoral Competitiveness and Party Size in Explaining Parties’ Policy Shifts

“…Small parties are usually defined by their size (Wagner, 2012;Williams and Spoon, 2015) while the defining characteristic of niche parties is their extreme or niche ideology (Adams et al, 2006;Meguid, 2008). While, depending on the precise operationalization, most or even all niche parties are also small parties, non-niche parties can be either small or large.…”

Amici come prima? Italy and Germany in times of crisis

“…At the same time, a flowering of different positions has accompanied the recent developments, concerning other delicate issues on the political agenda, such as security problems and immigration. As recent research shows, in many European countries the explosion of the Euro crisis and the concomitant decline of the European Union's credibility have evidently brought adaptations and changes in the positions of several parties, including mainstream and governing parties (Williams and Spoon 2015).…”

What Drives Political Parties' Commitment to the ‘Stability Culture’? An Empirical Analysis Based on the Electoral Manifestos Issued in EU Member States

“…For each party, the CMP computes the percentage of quasi-sentences in support of various political issues in electoral manifestos. While the resulting dataset has been criticized because it does not directly measure party positioning (Zulianello, 2014), it is widely recognized as a unique source of information for researchers interested in the saliency of specific issues in political manifestos and has been widely used to explore the relative importance that parties confer to key issues, such as economic policy in the globalization era (Burgoon, 2012;De Simone and Mourao, 2016;Milner and Judkins, 2004), protection of the environment (Facchini et al, 2017) and European integration (Williams and Spoon, 2015).…”

“…Improving upon previous research on determinants of party issue salience (Burgoon, ; Williams and Spoon, ), we propose an empirical approach based on non‐linear regression models, such as the Zero‐Inflated Beta model. This model is suitable when the dependent variable is a proportion, as in our case, and allows us to represent a party's manifesto drafting as a two‐step decision process, involving: (1) whether to include support to the ‘stability culture’ among the issues covered, and (2) if so, how much space to devote to it.…”