Electoral Euroscepticism and the Economic Crisis: Evidence from a 108-Elections Panel Study across Europe

The 2014 European elections have shown a sharp rise in parties and independent parliament members generally perceived as “Eurosceptic”, which succeeded in forming two groups in the European Parliament. Similarly, hard-Eurosceptic parties have obtained increasingly important results in the vast majority of elections across the continent. Against this background, this paper applies econometrics to electoral data in the attempt to analyse the interconnections between distressed economies, the fall of confidence in traditional political parties, and the electoral success of hard-line Eurosceptic parties. On a panel of 108 elections between 2008 and 2015, the random-effects model shows the relative impact of long and short term political trust, economic performance indicators, and institutional variables in determining the rise of hard-line Eurosceptic parties. In contrast with previous studies, which tended to de-emphasize the impact of economic performance in determining the success of Eurosceptic forces, the results of this paper detect both a direct and a mediated impact of the economic crisis on the electoral success of hard-line Eurosceptic parties, with particular emphasis on youth unemployment and persistence of high unemployment rates.