Partisan views of Russia: Analyzing European party electoral manifestos since 1991

Abstract

The connection between Russia and European political parties has been in the scholarly and popular spotlight recently. While scholars focus on the connection between the far right (and populist) parties and Russia, they have all but ignored the rapidly increasing literature on the role of political parties in foreign policy. This article provides an attempt to bridge these literatures. After analyzing a corpus of party manifestos, the results suggest that there is temporal variation in how European parties have seen Russia since the end of the Cold War. European parties tended to be mostly positive in their views of Russia prior to 2015. Geography and ideology were much less important as a factor in explaining party positions. While some ideological groups share attitudes across different borders, the overall influence of ideology on attitudes toward Russia is minimal.

Fellow travelers or Trojan horses? Similarities across pro-Russian parties’ electorates in Europe

“…Overall, Russia-sympathizer parties in Europe are found across different ideological families on both sides of the political spectrum (Onderco, 2019). Findings of recent studies that explored Russia’s influence campaigns are also consistent with this argument.…”

“…The widely used Chapel Hill Dataset does not evaluate party positioning in Russia. Also, the Comparative Manifestos Project dataset does not contain a single coded mention of Russia for countries outside the former Communist bloc and Greece since 1920 (Onderco, 2019). For the Soviet satellites and Greece, there are less than 50 positions on Russia coded for all parties since 1990, thus limiting the number of observations (Volkens et al, 2018).…”

Foreign economic policy in the European Parliament and economic interdependence with foreign powers

“…First, I control for Eastern European member states, which includes the eleven countries that entered the EU in the 2000s. 4 Following Onderco (2019: 530), I expect Eastern European MEPs to be more negatively predisposed towards Russia than Western European MEPs. The reason is that these countries have historical experiences of Russian occupation or interference, whereas Western European MEPs have a lower threat perception of Russia in general.…”

Consensus against all odds: explaining the persistence of EU sanctions on Russia

“…Support for sanctions spans the Polish political spectrum, although Civic Platform, in power in 2014, displayed a more conciliatory attitude towards Moscow than the ruling Law and Justice (Sus 2018). Most political parties in Central and Eastern Europe grew increasingly critical of Russia after 2015 (Onderco 2019). Polish members of the European Parliament appealed to the European Council, the European Commission and the High Representative for the extension of EU sanctions on Russia.…”

“…Mainstream political parties favour engagement with Russia without questioning the permanence of sanctions. Only leftist political parties advocate their lifting, while some conservatives see Russia as a bulwark against international terrorism, evidencing Russophile attitudes at both ends of the political spectrum (Lasheras 2016;Onderco 2019). Successive foreign ministers -conservatives José-Manuel García-Margallo and Alfonso Dastis, followed by centre-left Josep Borrell -advocated a two-track approach combining, in Dastis' words, 'condemning [Russia's] actions which are inadmissible, like the invasion of Crimea and the situation experienced in eastern Ukraine, and recognising that there are many areas in international life .…”