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EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND PARTY COMPETITION IN GERMAN FEDERAL ELECTIONS…
EUROPEAN INTEGRATION AND PARTY COMPETITION IN
GERMAN FEDERAL ELECTIONS
The : “Sleeping Giant” and its Awakening
In the mid 2000s
European publics began to push back more aggressively on the elite-led integration process
Since then, the EU has seen a steady increase in support for Euroskeptic parties, both on the extreme right and the extreme left.
The late 1990s and early 2000s
Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, mainstream parties had incentive to raise the EU issue
These one-off cases pointed to the potential importance of European integration in influencing national electoral outcomes and the transformative implications for national politics more broadly.
Political parties across EU member states largely failed to represent these Euroskeptical views
EU integration and expansion
The success of Euroskeptic parties in several countries also appears to have affected mainstream political parties in countries
European Integration and Party Competition in German Federal Elections This general trend of increased public mobilization against European integration, however, hides several important cross-national differences
Comparative studies suggest that the political context mediates the role Europe plays in national elections
ABSTRACT
The crisis is associated, among European Union citizens, with the degree of support for European integration. Those who are skeptical about the Euro and the debt crises in parts of the Eurozone tend also to be skeptical about European integration more generally. Now that the European Union is rapidly moving in its postfunctional phase, the election of 2013 is expected to mark a turning point in that regard
The Salience of European Integration
Focus first on the salience of European integration to indicator of how much party leaders think voters care about European integration.
There are several studies suggest that political parties do not simply reflect public opinion; they also can play a critical role in shaping public opinion generally and on European integration specifically.
The charts the salience of European integration over time. The values are a simple average of the percentage of quasi-sentences devoted to European integration for all political parties.
This result is indicates both salience and contestation, often from the ideological extremes, are necessary to observe EU issue voting.
This chart shows the salience of European integration for the German parties.
The result of salience of integration is relatively low for German parties compared to previous elections, especially for the mainstream parties.
Partisan Differentiation and Contestation
The conditional European issue voting model, the extent of partisan differentiation over European integration.
The key tenet of the “sleeping giant” hypothesis is that until the early 2000s
The chart plots the polarization of party positions on European integration using the above scale, comparing Germany with France, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark.
The chart show about German party positions on European integration
There is decidedly more contestation over Europe in the German party system than there has been at any point since the founding of the European Union lead up to the adoption of the Euro, more than before eastward expansion, and more than when Turkey became a candidate country to the European Union.
Political parties in many countries failed to sufficiently differentiate themselves on European integration.
Future of Europe in German Elections
A quarter of a century after reunification and seventy years after World War II, the battle over Europe seems to have arrived to German politics. The wake of the financial and European debt crises, and just as Germany.
From competition, also losing parties may have a strategic incentive to embrace Euroskepticism in order to shift the basis of competition and maximize their chance of winning elections. Moreover, the mainstream German parties have been reluctant to compete on the European dimension. Green-Pedersen finds the same tendency in Denmark.
The Finally, it remains to be seen whether the AfD’s success will ultimately threaten the European integration project more broadly and the collapse of the Eurozone and putting a halt to the integration process appears to be based more on identity, transnational trust, and cross-border interactions.
