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European fiscal integration is highly controversial and is assumed to lead to a Eurosceptic backlash among the public. Yet, in a historical decision in July 2020, European governments agreed on the ambitious recovery package ‘Next Generation EU’, establishing an unprecedented fiscal stabilisation capacity to address the economic and healthcare challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. We study the mass politics of European fiscal integration in a survey experiment on public support for a European Pandemic Recovery Fund (PRF) in five European countries in 2020. We find remarkably high support for a joint European fiscal instrument, which, however, is sensitive to policy design. While cross-country differences reflect collective self-interest, citizens’ left-right orientations, their EU positions, and perceived economic risk from COVID-19 structure differences within countries. Introduction Multidimensional preferences for the PRF Drivers of public support for the PRF Data and methods Average effects of variations in policy features on support Heterogeneous treatment effects across countries and individuals Overall support for the PRF Robustness tests Conclusion Supplemental material Acknowledgements Disclosure statement Additional information Footnotes Reference

Contains fulltext : 225256pre.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access) While some consider populist parties to be a threat to liberal democracy, others have argued that populist parties may positively affect the quality of democracy by increasing political participation of citizens. This supposition, however, has hitherto not been subjected to rigorous empirical tests. The voter turnout literature, moreover, has primarily focused on stable institutional and party system characteristics – ignoring more dynamic determinants of voter turnout related to party competition. To fill this double gap in the literature, we examine the effect of populist parties, both left and right, on aggregate-level turnout in Western and Eastern European parliamentary elections. Based on a dataset on 315 elections in 31 European democracies since 1970s, we find that turnout is higher when populist parties are represented in parliament prior to an election in Eastern Europe, but not in Western Europe. These findings further our understanding of the relationship between populism, political participation and democracy. 17 juni 2020 21 p.

Contains fulltext : 225272pre.pdf (Author’s version preprint ) (Open Access) Populism has become a pervasive concept in political science research. However, a central and basic question remains unanswered: which European parties are more populist than others? Despite the increasing wealth of studies on populism in parties, we lack data that measures populism in political parties in a valid and precise manner, that recognizes that populism is constituted by multiple dimensions, and that ensures full coverage of all parties in Europe. In this article, we first appraise the weaknesses of existing approaches. Arguing that parties’ populism should be measured as a latent construct, we then advocate a new approach to operationalizing and measuring populism in political parties using expert surveys. Relying on the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey spanning 250 political parties in 28 European countries, we show that populism is best measured in a multi-dimensional and continuous manner. We subsequently illustrate the advantages of our approach for empirical analysis in political science. 05 juli 2020 36 p.

Contains fulltext : 225310.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Open Access) New parties can shake up party systems by advancing new issues, influencing established competitors and affecting the dynamics of party competition. However, which kinds of new parties are successful? While the literature has extensively focused on institutional-level and election-level drivers of new party success, the literature on party-level determinants of new party success is scarce. As most studies on new party success focus on party entry at the election level or on new party survival, we argue that these studies suffer from selection bias as they do not leverage information on unsuccessful parties. This is understandable, since quality data on unsuccessful parties’ vote shares, party organizations and ideological characteristics are scant. To overcome this limitation, we examine the party-level determinants of new party success in the Netherlands, including all parties that have participated in national parliamentary elections since 1946. Our findings have important implications for the study of new parties in modern democracies. 21 oktober 2020 12 p.

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The governments of Hungary and Poland have been accused of sliding toward semi‐authoritarianism. Systematic analyses of the responses of political actors at the EU level to these instances of alleged democratic backsliding are scarce, however. This article therefore investigates the responses of Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) to the issue of the quality of democracy and the rule of law in Hungary and Poland. On the basis of data on parliamentary questions and motions for resolutions, we analyse who puts these issues on the European Parliament's (EP's) internal agenda and what positions legislators subsequently take in votes on resolutions. We find that both ideological preferences and strategic interests determine MEPs’ responses to democratic backsliding. Our findings are important for research on EU responses to democratic backsliding in EU member states as well as for the literature on party competition in the EP.

The European Union (EU) is an unlikely case for responsive policy-making. Yet, in recent years scholars have found that the EU’s overall decision-making output is correlated with the average prefer...

Contains fulltext : 241458.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) 29 november 2021 10 p.

As scholars explore opportunities for democratic renewal, the potential of ballot structures to improve the quality of representation has been largely neglected. We argue that expressive ballots can improve the congruence of political preferences between voters and their vote choice and, subsequently, decrease parliamentary polarization. Recognizing that voters’ political preferences are more complex than a dichotomous party-vote allows, we propose the ‘assembly ballot’, which allows voters to choose their ‘ideal parliament’ by distributing 150 parliamentary seats across all participating parties. To assess the consequences of the assembly ballot for ideological congruence and parliamentary composition, we conducted a survey experiment with over 16,000 respondents around the 2017 Dutch parliamentary elections in which respondents cast a vote in a mock-election using the assembly ballot or a closed-list PR ballot. Results show that ideological congruence is, on average, significantly higher for voters voting with the assembly ballot for both the left–right dimension and the cultural dimension, while also producing a more centripetal, less polarized parliament.

Contains fulltext : 241508.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) 8 p.

The extent to which a government’s policies mirror the preferences of its citizens is often deemed a key feature of a representative democracy. While research on this topic has traditionall...

Recent research has shown that mainstream political parties shift their positions on European integration in response to threats from niche parties. Whether or not this strategy affects the electoral fortunes of mainstream parties remains unclear, however. Drawing on both spatial and issue competition models of party competition, this study examines how mainstream political party accommodation of niche party position on the issue of European integration affects mainstream party electoral success. Using fixed-effects panel regression models, we investigate the effect of mainstream parties becoming more Eurosceptic in the face of a radical right political party on the size of the mainstream party’s vote share. We show that position shifts towards Euroscepticism are detrimental to centre-right mainstream party success when faced with a radical right party that has seen more electoral success. Our findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition and electoral responsiveness in the European Union.

Contains fulltext : 241511.pdf (Publisher’s version ) (Closed access) 9 p.

With the lingering Euro crisis, personalized competition for the Commission presidency, and a surge of Eurosceptic parties, the 2014 European Parliament elections took place against an unknown level of European Union politicization. How does this changing context affect the supply side of party competition on European issues in EP election campaigns? This article compares the 2014 and 2009 EP elections in two EU founding members with high electoral support for radical left and radical right Euroscepticism - France and the Netherlands. We study publically visible patterns of partisan mobilization in the written news media with semi-automated content analyses. The data indicate that visible party mobilization on EU issues was on average not significantly higher in 2014. While particularly mainstream and especially incumbent parties publically mobilize on European issues during both campaigns, the radical right's mobilization efforts have become more visible during the 2014 elections. Examining the temporal dynamics within electoral campaigns, we show that the Eurosceptic fringes exhibit significant contagion effects on the mainstream parties, but that the extent of this contagion was surprisingly lower in the 2014 campaign. As a result, the increasing EU politicization between the 2009 and 2014 electoral contests has not resulted in an enhanced and more interactive supply of partisan debate about Europe. (author's abstract)

Verschiedene Fallstudien suggerieren, dass antieuropaische Parteien einen Einfluss auf die Positionierung etablierter Parteien zur europaischen Integration haben. Eine systematisch-vergleichende Auseinandersetzung mit der Frage, ob etablierte Parteien auf euroskeptische Parteien reagieren, hat es allerdings noch nicht gegeben. Daher pruft dieser Beitrag mit einem komparativen Forschungsdesign, ob Wahlerfolge von euroskeptischen Herausforder-Parteien, die Positionen etablierter Parteien zur europaischen Integration in Westeuropa negativ beeinflussen. Auf Basis der Daten von Expertenumfragen wird gezeigt, dass Wahlerfolge von euroskeptischen Herausforderer-Parteien Positionsanderungen zum EU-Thema bei etablierten Parteien herbeifuhren konnen. Dies trifft allerdings nur zu, wenn euroskeptische Herausforderer in jenem Land das EU-Thema fur wichtig halten. Die Ergebnisse zeigen auserdem, dass Mitte-Links-Parteien sowohl auf Wahlerfolge von links- als auch rechtsradikalen euroskeptischen Parteien reagieren. Mitte-Rechts-Parteien sind hingegen nur fur rechtsradikalen Euroskeptizismus empfanglich.

This article examines whether the support for Eurosceptic challenger parties influences mainstream party position change on European integration in Western Europe. The key finding is that Eurosceptic challenger support is capable of influencing mainstream position shifts on European integration provided that, on average, EU issues are regarded as important by the Eurosceptic challengers. Moreover, the centre-left is more affected by Eurosceptic contagion since it is influenced by both radical right and radical left Eurosceptic success, whereas the centre-right is only susceptible to radical right success. The empirical analyses are based on panel regression analysis employing expert survey data provided by Chapel Hill Expert Survey. The findings presented in this article have important implications for the study of party positioning on European integration as well as for the study of party competition in general.

In this paper it is analysed whether the euro-crisis has induced a change in the degree of Europeanization of national public spheres. It is argued that ‘mediatizing politics’ on TV is a prerequisite for the accountability structures of liberal democracies. Examining the degree of Europeanization of public broadcaster news in Germany and the Netherlands in 2008 and 2011 this paper gauges the changes in terms of visibility of European issues and in terms of salience of items on European issues. Moreover it is analysed which news categories predominate, the tone of news items on European issues, and which explicit evaluations of European integration appear – and how these elements are affected by the euro-crisis. Finally, it is shown that although the Europeanization of public spheres increased as the euro-crisis developed, the EU was mostly portrayed negatively, focused predominantly on economic issues and political contestation was hardly visible.