Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament

Chiru, Mihail; Wunsch, Natasha

doi:10.1080/13501763.2021.1984546

Cited by 11 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(30 reference statements)

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“…12–13). Inside the EP, scholars have pointed to PRRPs' diverging substantive priorities (Chiru and Wunsch, 2021; Falkner and Plattner, 2020), the relative dominance of mainstream parties and low levels of politicization (Meijers and van der Veer, 2019, p. 1240; Startin, 2010, p. 432) as well as domestic constraints related to PRRPs' coalition potential (Almeida, 2010; McDonnell and Werner, 2018) as obstacles to greater PRR influence.…”

Section: A Discursive Approach To Eurosceptic Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement

Bélanger

Wunsch

2021

J of Common Market Studies

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The rise of populist radical right parties (PRRPs) in a growing number of European Union (EU) member states and inside the European Parliament (EP) has triggered concern over their ability to drive further contestation of European integration. Using EU enlargement as a test case, we analyse an original dataset of over 20700 hand-coded statements from the last three EP mandates to trace the emergence of an increasingly coherent, oppositional discourse by PRRPs towards a further widening of the EU. We show that PRRPs contribute to a generalized hardening of opposition towards enlargement, but fail to impose their identity-focused framing upon other parliamentary actors. Instead, we suggest that mainstream party groups accommodate PRRPs' essentialist discourse by shifting from technical, conditionality-based reasoning towards more political arguments articulated around human rights and democracy. Our findings feed into debates about the transnational cooperation of PRRPs and the political impact of Euroscepticism.

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Section: A Discursive Approach To Eurosceptic Contagionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement

Bélanger

Wunsch

2021

J of Common Market Studies

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“…Specifically, this article focuses on the EP's activities and debates during emergencies. Recent studies on MEPs’ voting behaviour and attitudes in times of crisis have covered the recent financial (Roger et al 2017) and migration (Högenauer, 2017) crises, the COVID-19 pandemic (Braghiroli 2022), democratic backsliding inside the EU (Chiru and Wunsch 2023), and the consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Braghiroli 2023; Holesch and Zagórski 2023). Their main institutional foci of these studies were either the way MEPs’ voted on the crisis or the way they narrated it, thereby highlighting supranational patterns of cooperation and competition and national versus partisan principal-agent dynamics.…”

Section: Exceptionality Of the Epmentioning

confidence: 99%

More than neighbours: Assessing crisis narratives of Nordic-Baltic elites in the context of European Union’s eastern border

Braghiroli,

Hagelin

2024

New Perspectives

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Over the last decade, the European Union has faced multiple crises that have affected the direction and the nature of the integration process. This study focuses on the challenges posed by the Belarusian-EU border crisis (2021) and the proposed travel restrictions towards Russian citizens (2022) in the context of the Nordic-Baltic EU member states. The study addresses their impact through the double prisms of regionality and level of governance. The study looks at how national elite narratives on borders and the movement of people travel to the supranational context, in this case the European Parliament. While the Parliament is often overlooked in favour of the Council or the Commission, this study regards it as an effective analytical bridge between domestic and supranational decision-making levels. To achieve its empirical goals the study relies on governments’ official communiques, while the parliamentary analysis is based on pre-vote debates and Parliament’s roll-call votes. The article finds that, while the national narratives highlight a growing convergence of governmental narratives in adopting or justifying restrictive bordering measures, the EP debates and votes highlight the relevance of ideology and partisanship when it comes to the issue and the growing significance of the gap between mainstream and non-mainstream forces.

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“…Where this takes place, far right parties target human rights, multiculturalism, and the institutionalization of liberal checks and balances. Moreover, their influence is felt at all levels of government -European, national, and local (Chiru and Wunsch, 2021;Ellinas and Iasonas, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Riders on the storm: the politics of disruption in European member states during the COVID-19 pandemic

Anghel

Jones

2022

East European Politics

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This paper explores how democracies handle the trade-off between public safety and fundamental democratic principles. We show that an exogenous shock, like the pandemic, creates incentives for governing elites to deploy self-empowering mechanisms to avoid institutional checks and balances -with lasting consequences for democratic performance. We examine this prospect in Italy and Romania. These cases have a long history of institutional gridlock; such history reinforces incentives to work around traditional institutions in responding to the pandemic. While the two cases vary in terms of the quality and resilience of their democratic institutions, we find that elites displayed a similar propensity to overlook the intricate institutional balances during a moment of crisis. In Italy, the executive strengthened its power relative to the legislature; in Romania, the strengthening is relative to the judiciary. This finding has implications in assessing the risk for falling standards of liberal democracy across the European Union.

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Democratic backsliding as a catalyst for polity-based contestation? Populist radical right cooperation in the European Parliament

Cited by 11 publications

References 36 publications

From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement

From Cohesion to Contagion? Populist Radical Right Contestation of EU Enlargement

More than neighbours: Assessing crisis narratives of Nordic-Baltic elites in the context of European Union’s eastern border

Riders on the storm: the politics of disruption in European member states during the COVID-19 pandemic

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