Suchergebnisse

"Rather than weakening the forces of nationalism among member states, the expanding power of the European Union actually fosters conditions favorable to regionalist movements within traditional nation-states. Using a cross-national, quantitative study of the advent of regionalist political parties and their success in national parliamentary elections since the 1960s, along with a detailed case study of the fortunes of the pro-independence Scottish National Party, Seth K. Jolly demonstrates that supranational integration and subnational fragmentation are not merely coincidental but related in a theoretical and predictable way. At the core of his argument, Jolly posits the Viability Theory: the theory that the EU makes smaller states more viable and more politically attractive by diminishing the relative economic and political advantages of larger-sized states. European integration allows regionalist groups to make credible claims that they do not need the state to survive because their regions are part of the EU, which provides access to markets, financial institutions, foreign policy, and other benefits. Ultimately, Jolly emphasizes, scholars and policy-makers must recognize that the benefits of European integration come with the challenge of increased regionalist mobilization that has the potential to reshape the national boundaries of Europe."--Publisher's description

The relationship between European integration and regionalist parties is still a largely unexplored area of research. In this paper, I evaluate whether regionalist parties perceive the European Union (EU) as an ally or an enemy. Using expert surveys, I assess the views of regionalist parties on European integration and I find that regionalist political parties are consistently pro-EU across time, space, and issue area. I find further support for this finding in a case study of the Scottish National Party.

European politics is increasingly being contested along two dimensions: the economic left-right dimension and a relatively new dimension focused on European integration and immigration. We test this framework at the party and individual-levels in the European Union. First, we use the Chapel Hill Expert Survey to demonstrate that there is no simple relationship between these dimensions at the party level in many European Union countries, and in fact the two dimensions are increasingly orthogonal. We then use the 2019 European Elections Study to show that the transnational-nationalist dimension significantly improves vote choice models relative to models that ignore this dimension. Even more striking, the transnational-nationalist dimension is not just significant, but actually improves vote choice models as much or more than the economic left-right dimension.

AbstractUsing survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that party placements on the economic left-right dimension are cross-nationally comparable across the EU; however, the socio-cultural dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey included anchoring vignettes which we use as "bridge votes" to place parties from different countries on a common liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich–McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable, interval-level measures of a party's socio-cultural and EU ideological positions.

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilise party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES). Our findings indicate that multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disaffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This finding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifications across European democracies.