Euroscepticism among EU Architects? A Longitudinal Analysis of Mainstream Parties

It is widely accepted among political scientists that there has been a politicization of the EU integration process over the past 20 years (Hooghe & Marks 2009). One obvious manifestation of this politicization is the sharp anti-EU stances of left- and right-wing populist parties. As a consequence party based Euroscepticism is often seen as a phenomenon that is limited to small parties at the margins while mainstream parties are assumed to be reliable defenders of European integration. However, this might have changed more recently. In fact, there has always been a potential for Euroscepticism among mainstream parties arising from ideological commitments, strategic incentives, and national peculiarities. The empirical question is: to which degree has this potential actually materialized in public party competition? Existing data sets do not allow answering this question properly because party positions are not measured in enough detail. The novel data that is used in this paper does not suffer from this handicap. Furthermore, it allows longitudinal analyses over a period from the 70s to the present. Data is generated by relational content analysis of newspapers in the tradition of Kriesi et al. (2008, 2012). This paper first presents theoretical expectations of how mainstream Euroscepticism has developed over time. One expectation is that the increasing politicization of EU integration has incited mainstream parties to qualify their traditional pro-Europeanism. Furthermore, mainstream Euroscepticism is expected to shift from the center-left towards the center-right over time as European integration moves beyond mere market liberalization. These and other hypotheses are confronted with the novel data mentioned above.