Beyond Kriesiland: EU integration as a super issue after the Eurocrisis

Abstract

Abstract. Where some researchers have seen only a limited impact of Europeanisation on national party politics, others have added a separate European Union dimension to the pre-existing economic left-right dimension to model the national political space. This article examines the effects of the European crisis on the national political space across the EU utilising data from the 2014 European Election Survey. It analyses the effect of a country's economic development on the coherence between attitudes towards the EU and economic issues using multilevel regression. Strong evidence is found that in the Southern European debtor states economic and European issues are merging as a result of strong European interference in their economic policy. In the Northern European creditor states a second relevant dimension focuses on cultural issues. These results offer the next step in theorising Europeanisation.

Blame‐shifting in Times of Permanent Austerity: Evidence from Spain and Greece in the Eurozone Crisis

“…Bringing both parts of the analysis together, the final step of the analysis suggests that external blame‐shifting is slightly more common among left‐wing parties (in Greece). This interpretation is in line with recent studies in party politics suggesting that European and economic issues merged in the eurozone crisis (Otjes and Katsanidou, ).…”

It's not Economic Interventionism, Stupid! Reassessing the Political Economy of Radical Right‐wing Populist Parties

“…As regards our selection of data, we chose manifestos for every party from years before the sudden on‐set of the financial crisis (in 2008) and after it had devolved into the Eurozone sovereign debt crisis (which started in the end of 2009). One should note here that these countries are all Western European countries where the impact of the financial and Eurozone sovereign debt crisis has been much weaker than in Southern European countries such as Greece, Spain and Portugal which were bailed out, and which has led to a different regional political landscape (Otjes and Katsanidou ), but note that in Spain and Portugal there is no radical right‐wing populist party in parliament, while in Greece the crisis caused the demise of one right‐wing populist party and the formation of another.…”

Blaming Brussels? The Impact of (News about) the Refugee Crisis on Attitudes towards the EU and National Politics

“…We therefore expect that the way in which the EU is associated with the refugee influx depends on citizens' left–right orientation and, more specifically, on their attitudes towards immigration. In a recent study, Otjes and Katsanidou () show that the extent to which citizens' views of the EU are affected by immigration levels indeed depends on whether they are opposed to immigration. We therefore expect an increase in the number of asylum applications to have the largest impact on those who are already negatively predisposed towards immigration.…”