European Elections and Domestic Politics: Lessons from the Past and Scenarios for the Future

9. EU support and party choice

N I N E EU support and party choice wouter van der brug, cees van der eijk, and mark n. franklin Orientations toward European integration and toward the European Union figure prominently in many chapters of this volume. Chapter 4 focused on parties’ orientations toward European integration, and on voters’ perceptions thereof. Chapter 5 analyzed differences in supportive attitudes toward the EU, looking for explanations at contextual and individual levels. Chapter 7 demonstrated that media news affects citizens’ orientations and attitudes toward the EU. In this chapter we investigate the effects of such attitudes toward the EU on party choice. Attitudes toward the EU can affect party choice both in European elections and in national elections. At the time of European elections, citizens are more likely to be primed to take issues of European integration into account than in national elections when news coverage is predominantly focused on domestic issues. As a consequence, we may expect their attitudes toward European integration to affect their choice of parties. This influence may be limited, however, by the small degree to which issues relating to European integration are politicized in most EU countries. In national elections too, the lack of politicization is likely to restrict the salience of issues concerning European integration. But national elections are potentially more opportune occasions to vote according to one’s attitudes about integration, as the future of the integration process is primarily determined by national politicians, not by members or aspiring 168 chapter members of the European Parliament. For different reasons we may thus expect attitudes toward integration to affect party choice in national elections as well as in European elections, making it appropriate to study effects of such attitudes in quite general terms. In this chapter we do not concern ourselves primarily with differences in party choice between national and European elections. We already know from the analyses in chapters 2 and 3 that such differences are quite common and related to the timing and the second-order character of European elections. In this chapter we address the question whether and how voters’ orientations toward European integration affect their choice of parties in general. Our models pertain first of all to national elections, but we provide additional analyses to assess whether effects of EU support on party choice are different among those who vote for the same party in both elections and those who voted for different parties. Previous studies have shown that orientations toward the European Union and toward European integration contribute little to explaining party choice (e.g., Reif and Schmitt 1980; van der Eijk, Franklin, and Oppenhuis 1996; van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999). There are good reasons, however, for attitudes toward European integration having become more important predictors of the vote in 1999 than they were before. First, in the years before 1999, the member states of the Union increasingly transferred their jurisdiction over a wide set of policy areas to the EU. The actual importance of the European arena for determining policies that directly impinge on citizens’ lives increased noticeably during the decade before 1999. To the extent that voters have become aware of this increased importance of EU policies, this may heighten the relevance of elections to the European Parliament as an occasion to express their orientations toward the Union, its policies, and further integration. Second, citizens in the member states of the Union have witnessed ‘Europe’ becoming politically more contested in recent years (see also Marks and Steenbergen 2004). Opposition to the deepening and widening of the Union has gradually become an element of mainstream political discourse, often backed by respectable parties, interest groups, and social elites. Failed or nearly failed referenda about the treaties of Maastricht and Amsterdam, or in non-EU states about joining the Union, demonstrated such political contestation not only to the citizens in the countries involved, but in all European countries.1 Events such as the introduction of the euro generated more discord among politicians and social and economic interests than many earlier steps in the integration process had done, even in the absence of referenda. This political contestation may have helped to ‘prime’ citizens into making the connection between their attitudes EU support and party choice 169 toward European integration and their actual choice of party.2 Of course, some of these developments were still in the making at the time of the 1999 European elections, but they...