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First published March 2007

The Role of European Integration in National Election Campaigns

Abstract

This study asks how and to what extent political parties in six West European countries - Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK - have addressed the process of European integration in national election campaigns since the 1970s. Based on a content analysis of newspaper data, the results show that Eurosceptic mobilization in national election campaigns has become most pronounced in countries where the public have always been rather apprehensive about European integration. In line with the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, in Switzerland and the UK mobilization around European integration is primarily driven by conservatives and/or the new populist right. In countries where the process of European integration is politically less salient, conservatives and/or the new populist right have been less Eurosceptic and their mobilization efforts have been more limited. While providing mixed support for the ‘new cleavage’ hypothesis, the study provides scant support for the received wisdom that Euroscepticism among political parties is essentially dictated by ‘opposition politics’.

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1.
1 Carey (2002), Christin and Trechsel (2002), Diez Medrano (2003), Hooghe and Marks (2004) and Kriesi (2002) provide empirical support for this idea. McLaren (2004), on the other hand, shows that, although fear of loss of national identity has an impact on individual support for the EU, this impact is not very strong. Indeed, both individual utilitarianism and the benefits that accrue to various countries have a greater impact on levels of support for the EU.
2.
2 My argument is similar to that of Marks and Wilson, but not identical, since they distinguish between ‘economic’ and ‘political’ integration. The cultural side of the European integration process is, of course, intimately connected to the political one, given the importance of national identities in this context.
3.
3 Although the new politics dimension of party competition, ranging from GAL (green/alternative/libertarian) to TAN (traditional/authoritarian/nationalist), introduced by Hooghe et al. (2002) is closely related to the new cleavage introduced here, it is not entirely identical. It mixes the new cleavage within the new middle class that has been articulated by the new social movements of the 1970s and 1980s and the Green parties with the new cleavage that separates the new middle-class winners from the old middle-class and working-class losers from denationalization articulated by the new populist right and its national conservative allies since the 1980s and especially since the 1990s.
4.
4 The selected newspapers were Die Presse and Kronenzeitung in Austria, The Times and the Sun in the UK, Le Monde and Le Parisien in France, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Bild in Germany, NRC Handelsblad and Algemeen Dagblad in the Netherlands, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung and Blick in Switzerland.
5.
5 The radical left and the two parties of the liberal radical family (the Dutch D66 and the French MRG) are exceptions. However, these exceptions are based on very few cases in the 1970s and should therefore be treated with caution.
6.
6 In the 1990s, the Swiss greens paid even greater attention to this issue than the conservatives did. Nevertheless, in absolute terms, conservatives dominated the Swiss debate on Europe.
7.
7 The effect of Euroscepticism is indicated by the effect of the average direction of all the claims attributed to a given party.
8.
8 The opposition indicator equals 1 if a party is in opposition at the time of the national elections, and 0 otherwise.
9.
9 For the 1970s, we do not have sufficient data. For the 1990s, the radical left and the greens as well as the two liberal currents had to be grouped together.

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Article first published: March 2007
Issue published: March 2007

Keywords

  1. cleavage structure
  2. electoral campaigns
  3. Euroscepticism
  4. political parties
  5. transformation of party systems

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Authors

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Hanspeter Kriesi
University of Zurich, Switzerland

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