Does European economic integration affect electoral turnout and economic voting?

Abstract

L’UE a acquis de nombreuses compétences économiques depuis quelques années. Dans cet article, je fais l’hypothèse qu’en réduisant la marge de manœuvre économique des gouvernements, l’intégration européenne peut réduire 1) la participation électorale et 2) le vote économique, à l’instar de la mondialisation. Ces deux hypothèses sont testées au niveau individuel dans une perspective comparée grâce aux European Election Studies (EES) de 2009 et 2014. Les résultats indiquent que la perception des contraintes économiques de l’UE diminue le vote économique après la crise, mais pas en 2009. En revanche, les données ne montrent pas d’effet sur la participation électorale.

Why vote when you cannot choose? EU intervention and political participation in times of constraint

“…The evidence presented also adds voice to the arguments that the increasing of European integration has detrimental effects for political turnout (LeGall, 2017(LeGall, , 2018. Here I argue that the reduced autonomy of EU member states via the contract between intervened-in states and the EU institutions has a regressive effect on electoral participation.…”

“…There is mixed evidence on how EU constraints affect electoral turnout. Le Gall (2018), relying on data from the European Electoral Study (EES) in 2009, observes a reduction in turnout in national elections when voters perceive the EU as having a major role over domestic outcomes. The effect is not consistently observed using data from 2014.…”

Do perceived economic constraints affect performance voting?

“…This dataset includes responsibility attribution between the EU and respondents' member state and performance perceptions across a number of economic and non-economic policy areas. Whilst responsibility attribution is not an ideal measure of constraint, these variables have been used by other authors to study similar questions (Costa Lobo and Lewis-Beck 2012;Devine 2021;Le Gall 2018, 2019. We thus repeat our analysis here on a pooled sample of 26 countries (N = 19788).…”

“…With respect to voting behaviour, research indicates that external constraints from both globalisation and European integration reduce turnout (Marshall and Fisher 2015;Steiner 2010Steiner , 2016Turnbull-Dugarte 2020) by diminishing the belief that who's in power makes a difference (Vowles 2008) and by decreasing political choice via party convergence (Steiner and Martin 2012), eventually weakening party responsiveness (Ezrow and Hellwig 2014; though see Devine and Ibenskas, 2021). Second, there is evidence that the limitation of the economic room to manoeuvre also weakens the extent of the economic vote (Costa Lobo and Lewis-Beck 2012;Duch and Stevenson 2008;Fernández-Albertos 2006;Hellwig 2014b;Hellwig and Samuels 2007;Le Gall 2018). According to this line of argument, voters adapt to the loss of economic leeway of governments on economic policy by judging incumbents less on economic performance.…”