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

Abstract

This article analyses how economic intervention affects individuals’ political behaviour by assessing the impact of intervention on aggregate and individual turnout. The intervention of the European Union in a selection of member states is viewed as having negative consequences for democratic choice, reducing the ability of voters to select between distinct policy alternatives, resulting in the absence of the primary benefit of voting: choice. It is argued that when voters are faced with electoral choices without the ability to shape policy alternatives, they are less likely to vote. Moreover, the negative effect of intervention is found to be conditioned by both individuals’ level of education and ideological identification. Voters on the centre and the left who feel abandoned by left-leaning parties, who have prioritised being responsible to their European paymasters, are significantly more likely to abstain when exposed to intervention. Empirical support for the argument is found via the analysis of aggregate turnout as well as individual level data from the European Social Survey from across fifteen Western European states.

Economic Crisis and Attitudes Towards Democracy: How Ideology Moderates Reactions to Economic Downturns

“…As Armingeon et al (2015) argue, citizens' perceptions about the quality of representation have been eroded as a result of the economic crisis, especially where the response to the crisis was mostly based on austerity and where Eurozone constraints did not allow national governments to define the way they wanted to address the crisis. Also, we have also emphasized that in some countries, especially in those whose economies were intervened by the EU as is the case of Spain, left-wing citizens might have felt politically orphan because the parties that should have represented the policy alternatives to the austerity measures prioritized being responsible in the EU's eyes (Turnbull-Dugarte and Stuart, 2020). Thus, we also test this argument with data from a survey experiment conducted with an online sample in Spain and fielded by Netquest during the last week of January 2018.…”

“…While initially for some citizens their discontent had its origin in the perceived inefficiency of the political system in providing economic prosperity, there was widespread contestation against the lack of representation. This would be particularly relevant in the case of centre and left-wing citizens who found out how the only recipes to overcome the crisis were, in most cases, severe cuts in social expenditure, labour market liberalisation and, in short, policies that limited the expansion of the welfare state (Turnbull-Dugarte and Stuart, 2020). Despite the abundance of literature on how context affects attitudes towards democracy Guthmann, 2014: Magalhães, 2014;Cordero and Simón, 2016: or Christmann and Torcal, 2017 among others), there is a lack of research into why citizens react in different ways to the same scenario.…”

“…The frugal agenda that was introduced in most countries and sometimes forced by EU institutions as a way to overcome the economic slump made them much less useful in the eyes of leftwing voters in pursuit of policy representation. Consequently, centre-left-and left-wing citizens would be much more dissatisfied with the political system as the economic crisis would have limited their chances of having their preferred policies implemented (Turnbull-Dugarte and Stuart, 2020).…”

Decision-making autonomy and political trust:Experimental evidence from ‘Brexit’ and the 2019UK General Election campaign

“…Thus, the letter contributes to understanding the broader issue of the link between mass political attitudes and sovereignty concerns (Gall, 2017;Jensen et al, 2019;Kosmidis, 2018;Turnbull-Dugarte, 2020) and more specifically the attitudinal causes and consequences of Brexit (e.g Goodwin et al, 2018;Hobolt et al, 2020).…”

Do perceived economic constraints affect performance voting?

“…One of the core theories of international integration and domestic politics is the 'room to manoeuvre' (RTM) theory, which posits that greater integration reduces the RTM governments have over (economic) policy, with widespread consequences for democratic politics (Hellwig 2014b). 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).…”