Skip to main content
Log in

A hidden giant? Exploring the centrifugal dynamics of attitudes towards the European unification

  • Original Article
  • Published:
Acta Politica Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The existing empirical findings regarding the electoral impact of the European Union in national politics have failed to come up with an unambiguous conclusion. This lack of consensus has given rise to the contested argument that the EU is a potentially relevant issue not yet ‘awaked’ – the ‘sleeping giant’ metaphor. Nevertheless, in none of these studies has there been any attempt to investigate not whether but rather how this issue manifests itself in vote choice. In trying to fulfil this gap, we examine the EU issue under a spatial perspective focusing on the distinction between proximity and directional voting. Comparing it with the classic left-right dimension, we show that the EU evokes a more directional way of thinking about parties’ stances, rewarding those parties able to overcome the lack of differentiation in the centre of the spectrum and to present clearer alternatives.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Figure 1
Figure 2
Figure 3

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. To save space, only the quadratic form of the proximity utility function is described at this part, since it facilitates the combination of the two models in a single equation, as shown above. A linear (‘city-block’) form would be presented by the absolute differences (∣V ik P jk ∣) of voter and party issue positions.

  2. That said, based on a survey experiment, Claassen (2009) comes up with considerable diversity in the performance of the two models with respect to two different issues, namely military spending (which works more under proximity rule) and abortion (which evokes a more directional evaluation scheme). This led the author to regard issue heterogeneity as a potentially fruitful factor for the understanding of the picture of mixed evidence in observational research (2009, p. 244). To be sure, there is no attempt to account theoretically for this pattern, which, as the author acknowledges, merits future research (p. 246).

  3. To test the relationship between the vote and the two sets of indicators we use the 2005 British Election Study, which includes both types of questions. Importantly, mean biserial correlation between the like/dislike question and vote choice for the three major British parties is 0.56, whereas the equivalent figure for the PTV question is 0.90. To see why party sympathy is not the same as party utility, take the example of the Greens or the Liberal Democrats in Germany and Britain respectively. Their mean scores in measures of party sympathy or consistently higher than their mean scores in the PTV question simply because the latter takes into account other factors apart from likeability for the evaluation of parties, such as the party's potential to attain office.

  4. To show that this is indeed the case, we refer to the EES study and focus on the British case, which is generally assumed to be one of the most concentrated party systems in Europe. Interpreting values greater than 5 in the PTV scale as indicating positive evaluations of parties, reflecting thus party preferences, it is interesting that respondents give a relatively high score (⩾6) to more than one parties. In fact, the average number of parties, given a ‘positive’ score amounts to 2.2. This is a sign of the fact that utilities are not ipsative, as would be indicated by a qualitative dependent variable technique.

  5. Interested readers are referred to Oppenhuis (1995), Tillie (1995).

  6. To test whether this criterion is also satisfied in our case, we calculated Tillie's coefficient of concordance between party choice and PTV, which is given by the following formula (1995, p. 50):

    where VPmax the highest utility score given to a party, VPvote the utility score given to party voted for, VPmin the lowest utility score given to a party. The nominator captures the level of congruence between vote choice and utility scores. The denominator measures the range of disparity if vote does not match with the maximum utility score. C can take values from 0 (no relation between vote and party preference) to 1 (party voted for is given maximum score). The average value of C across all countries is 0.94, indicating a very strong link between actual vote and PTV.

  7. It is impossible to test Condition 2 because there is no question about voters’ second preferences. Tests made by Tillie (1995) and Van der Eijk et al (2006), however, show that the ranking of parties in PTV is consistent with their second choice. An implicit test of this criterion involves the examination of the preference structure of tactical voters. By using again the post-election survey of the 2005 BES, we find that tactical voters consistently give a higher PTV score for the party really preferred than the party actually opted for on tactical grounds in that particular election.

  8. To briefly assess the validity of this assumption in the present context, we tested mean differences in the range of PTV scores across all points of the left-right and European unification scales. If particular subgroups conceive of this question in a systematically distinct fashion, this should be indicated by the variability in their scores for their most and least preferred parties. Although there is some variation, mean standard deviation is less than 0.05 for both questions, indicating a high level of consistency in the understanding of the question among the respondents.

  9. To account for the artificial inflation of observations we weight observations according to the following formula: w=1/n2, where n2 is the second-level identifier, that is, the number of parties for which the respondent gave valid PTV responses.

  10. That is, to apparently find contextual effects which in reality are accounted for by individual differences of the populations studied in distinct countries.

  11. This means that simply adding each term separately does not solve the problem because it still implies that the proximity model might be attributed with explanatory power incorporated in the product term, thus capturing also the variance originally explained by the directional model.

  12. Typically, the evaluation of the two models under equation (5) implies the comparison of the coefficients related to the two scalar terms (V ik 2,P jk 2) versus the double of the coefficient associated with the product term (V ik P jk ). The problem is that there is no clear threshold in order to evaluate the relative performance of the competing models. In fact, this exercise is informative about the underlying process through which voters evaluate parties with respect to a given issue only when simulations are drawn to identify the data generation process stemming from either of the two models). This, however, is in turn highly dependent on the measurement strategy regarding parties’ placements, a problem which here is addressed in the next section of the article.

  13. This is so insofar as voter distribution is unimodal. Here this is the case for both issues, with their distribution also showing close to the normal.

  14. Only demographics are used as controls in the two models: age, gender, education, class, occupation and region of residence (size of locality). With the exception of age, all other variables are fully factorized. The results presented below are remarkably robust to the presence or absence of these covariates as well as to the inclusion of a measure of strength of partisanship in the models.

  15. The maximization of function (6) comes after the estimation of the coefficients. Given that the maximization point is a function of coefficients (−b/2c), parametric estimation does not help in evaluating the degree of uncertainty associated with each estimate. Accordingly we derive the 95% bootstrapped confidence intervals of this estimate with bootstrapping (1,000 samples).

  16. To be sure, there is no need to assume linearity here, which is imposed only for simplicity reasons. Any monotonic pattern would be sufficient to indicate evidence in favour of the directional model.

  17. A constant source of controversy among spatial modellers relates to the measurement of parties’ locations (P jk ), which are typically measured either by respondents’ individual party placements or by taking some measure of the central tendency of this distribution. The advocates of directional theory (Macdonald and Rabinowitz, 2007) opt for the second. They give two reasons for doing so. First, the logic of spatial theory is based on the premise that parties have a unique position in the issue space. Yet, as Lewis and King (1999) argue, if one is to accept that parties expose themselves differently to different types of voters, mean party stances introduce measurement error. Addressing this issue from a voter-oriented angle, Van der Brug (2001, p. 54) argues that it is ‘unrealistic to assume that voters’ utility functions would depend upon an aggregate view of the world’ (see also Gilljam, 1997). Second, individuals’ party locations have the problem of projection bias, which can manifest itself either as assimilation or as contrast: people tend to locate parties they like closer to their own views (assimilation) and parties they do not like more far away from their own ideal points (contrast), especially when they do not have an established idea about a party's stance on a given issue (Brody and Page, 1972; Granberg and Brent, 1974; Granberg, 1983). It is this feedback loop from preferences, formed on grounds different than parties’ issue stances, to perceptions about parties’ positions that makes individual party placements a more favourable measure for the proximity model.

References

  • Bartle, J., Dellepiane-Avellaneda, S. and Stimson, J. (2011) The moving centre: Preferences for government activity in Britain, 1950–2010. British Journal of Political Science 41 (2): 259–285.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Binnema, H.A. (2003) Three sorts of Europe: The Europeanization of Party Programmes in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. Paper prepared for the 2nd ECPR General Conference; 18–21 September, Marburg, Section 15-3: Europeanization of Political Parties: Opportunities and Constraints.

  • Brody, R.A. and Page, B.I. (1972) The assessment of policy voting. American Political Science Review 66: 450–458.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cho, S. and Endersby, J.W. (2003) Issues, the spatial theory of voting, and British general elections: A comparison of proximity and directional models. Public Choice 114 (3–4): 275–293.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Claassen, R.L. (2009) Direction versus proximity: Amassing experimental evidence. American Politics Research 37 (2): 227–253.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Vries, C.E. (2007) Sleeping giant: Fact or fairytale? How European integration affects national elections. European Union Politics 8 (3): 363–385

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • De Vries, C.E. and Tillman, E.R. (2007) Politicizing Europe? The impact of European integration on domestic electoral politics in East-Central Europe. Paper presented at the 4th ECPR General Conference, Pisa.

  • Downs, A. (1957) An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York: Harper and Row.

    Google Scholar 

  • Evans, G. (1999) Europe: A new electoral cleavage? In: G. Evans and P. Norris (eds.) Critical Elections: British Parties and Voters in Long-term Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franklin, M. (2001) How structural factors cause turnout variations at European parliament elections. European Union Politics 2 (3): 309–328.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freire, A. (2006) Bringing social identities back in: The social anchors of left-right orientation in Western Europe. International Political Science Review 27 (4): 359–378.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gabel, M. (2000) European integration, voters, and national politics. West European Politics 23 (4): 52–72.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Gilljam, M. (1997) The directional theory under the magnifying glass: A reappraisal. Journal of Theoretical Politics 9 (1): 5–12.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Granberg, D. (1983) Preference, expectations and placement judgements: Some evidence from Sweden. Social Psychology Quarterly 46 (4): 363–368.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Granberg, D. and Brent Jr, E.E. (1974) Dove-Hawk placement in the 1968 election: Application of social judgement and balance theories. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 29 (5): 687–695.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Green, J. (2007) When voters and parties agree: Valence issues and party competition. Political Studies 55 (3): 629–655.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hix, S. (1995) Second-order or third rate: Issues in the campaign for the elections for the European parliament. Electoral Studies 14 (2): 183–198.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hix, S. (1999) Dimensions and alignments in European Union politics: Cognitive constraints and partisan responses. European Journal of Political Research 35 (1): 69–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hix, S. and Goetz, K. (eds.) (2001) Introduction: European integration and national political systems. In: Europeanised Politics? European Integration and National Political Systems. London: Frank Cass, pp. 1–26.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, G., Tomz, M. and Wittenberg, J. (2000) Making the most of statistical analyses: Improving interpretation and presentation. American Journal of Political Science 44 (2): 341–355.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Knutsen, O. (1997) The partisan and the value-based component of left-right self-placement: A comparative study. International Political Science Review 18 (2): 191–225.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, J.B. and King, G. (1999) No evidence on directional vs. proximity voting. Political Analysis 8 (1): 21–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lijphart, A. (1980) The structure of inference, In: G.A. Almond and S. Verba (eds.) The Civic Culture Revisited, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Comp, pp. 37–56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, E. and Rabinowitz, G. (2007) Simulating models of issue voting. Political Analysis 15 (4): 406–427.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, S.E., Listhaug, O. and Rabinowitz, G. (1991) Issues and party support in multiparty systems. American Political Science Review 85 (4): 1107–1131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, S.E., Rabinowitz, G. and Listhaug, O. (1995) Political sophistication and models of issue voting. British Journal of Political Science 25 (4): 453–483.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, S.E., Rabinowitz, G. and Listhaug, O. (1998a) On attempting to rehabilitate the proximity model: Sometimes the patient just can’t be helped. The Journal of Politics 60 (3): 653–690.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, S.E., Rabinowitz, G. and Listhaug, O. (1998b) Issue competition in the 1993 Norwegian national election. Public Choice 97 (3): 295–322.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mair, P. (2000) The limited impact of Europe on national party systems. West European Politics 23 (4): 27–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marks, G. and Wilson, C. (2000) The past in the present: A cleavage theory of party response to European integration. British Journal of Political Science 30 (3): 433–459.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marks, G., Wilson, C. and Ray, L. (2002) National political parties and European integration. American Journal of Political Science 46 (3): 585–594.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Marsh, M. (1998) Testing the second-order election model after four European elections. British Journal of Political Science 28 (4): 591–607.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Merrill, S. and Grofman, B. (1999) A Unified Theory of Voting: Directional and Proximity Models. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Nicolet, S. (2007) The hidden European voter. A study of the conditional impact of European political preferences on the vote in national elections. Paper presented at the 4th ECPR General Conference, Pisa.

  • Oppenhuis, E. (1995) Voting Behavior in Europe. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Het Spinhuis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rabinowitz, G. and Macdonald, S.E. (1989) A directional theory of issue voting. The American Political Science Review 83 (1): 93–121.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Reif, K. and Schmitt, H. (1980) Nine second-order elections: A conceptual framework for the analysis of European election results. Electoral Journal of Political Research 8 (1): 3–45.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Robinson, W.S. (1950) Ecological correlations and the behavior of individuals. American Sociological Review 15 (3): 351–357.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scheve, K. (1999) European economic integration and electoral politics in France and Great Britain. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Atlanta, GA.

  • Schmitt, H. and Thomassen, J. (1999) Distinctiveness and cohesion of parties. In: H. Schmitt and J. Thomassen (eds.) Political Representation and Legitimacy in the European Union. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Seligson, M. (2002) The renaissance of political culture, or the renaissance of the ecological fallacy? Comparative Politics 34 (2): 273–292.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Snijders, T. and Bosker, R.J. (1999) Multilevel Analysis. An Introduction to Basic and Advanced Multilevel Modelling. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Steenbergen, M.R. and Jones, B.S. (2002) Modeling multilevel data structures. American Journal of Political Science 46 (1): 218–237.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tillie, J. (1995) Party Utility and Voting Behaviour. Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Het Spinhuis.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tillman, E.R. (2004) The European Union at the ballot box? European integration and voting behavior in the new member states. Comparative Political Studies 37 (5): 590–610.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Tomz, M. and van Houweling, R.P. (2008) Candidate positioning and voter choice. American Political Science Review 102 (3): 303–318.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van der Brug, W. (2001) Perceptions, opinions and party preferences in the face of a real world event: Chernobyl as a natural experiment in political psychology. Journal of Theoretical Politics 13 (1): 53–80.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van der Brug, W. and Fennema, M. (2003) Protest or mainstream? How the European anti-immigrant parties developed into two separate groups by 1999. European Journal of Political Research 42 (1): 55–76.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van der Brug, W., Fennema, M. and Tillie, J. (2000) Anti-immigrant parties in Europe: Ideological or protest vote? European Journal of Political Research 37 (1): 77–102.

    Google Scholar 

  • Van der Eijk, C. and Franklin, M. (1996) Choosing Europe? The European Electorate and National Politics in the Face of Union. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Van der Eijk, C., Franklin, M. and Marsh, M. (1996) What voters teach us about Europe-wide elections: What Europe-wide elections teach us about voters. Electoral Studies 15 (2): 149–166.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Van der Eijk, C., Van der Brug, W., Kroh, M. and Franklin, M. (2006) Rethinking the dependent variable in voting behavior: On the measurement and analysis of electoral utilities. Electoral Studies 25 (3): 424–447.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Westholm, A. (1997) Distance versus direction: The illusory defeat of the proximity theory of electoral choice. American Political Science Review 91 (4): 865–883.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zaller, J. (1992) The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Dinas, E., Pardos-Prado, S. A hidden giant? Exploring the centrifugal dynamics of attitudes towards the European unification. Acta Polit 47, 378–399 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.13

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/ap.2012.13

Keywords

Navigation