Transnational Solidarity and Eurosceptic Voting: The Case of Greece

During the first years following the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community in the 1950s, public support for the European integration project was commonly described as a “permissive consensus”. In the main, popular positions towards European integration showed high-levels of support. Nowadays, Eurosceptic attitudes are on the rise all over the European Union. Since the onset of the European Financial Crisis, Euroscepticism reached historical approval rates. Former research postulates that Euroscepticism depends on European Identity as well as sociotropic reflections. One issue that is related to both of these terms is European Solidarity. Over the course of the Financial Crisis, solidarity towards other European Union member states seems to have been an important factor affecting attitudes towards European integration. For this, solidarity in the European Union had two sides: countries agreeing on financial bailout programs for fellow member states and receiving countries that were willing to undergo austerity measures. Thus far literature has focused on European solidarity in creditor states. In these countries when solidarity is low voters oppose financial bailout packages for other EU states. The other side of the transnational solidarity coin can be seen in debtor states that are expected to accept and implement harsh austerity measures, which are of course not popular among the population. Weak feelings of transnational solidarity in Southern European debtor states are thus expected to foster Anti-EU voting. We expect to find this especially among left-wing voters as left-wing parties disapprove demands for budget cuts in financially struggling EU states and ask for unconditional financial assistance provided by the EU. The expectation is a pronounced left-wing Euroscepticism based on low levels of transnational solidarity due to its high cost in terms of austerity measures. To examine this theoretical concept of transnational solidarity in weak economic conditions, we choose Greece as a case study. We decided to select Greece as a typical case since the Financial Crisis economically struck the country to a great extent, which additionally led to political upheavals. To that end, three waves of the cross-sectional survey financed by the project “Political & Social Radicalism in Greece” are analyzed and tested against our assumptions. With these data it is possible to trace back the developments of solidarity and Eurosceptic voting over the course of the European Financial Crisis. Through the conduction of logistic regression analyses, solidarity’s impact on Anti-EU voting is measured within a timespan from January to November 2015. In this period two national elections as well as one referendum on austerity measures took place in Greece. In addition, the European Asylum Crisis reached its peak in 2015 and Greece experienced a high influx of refugees at this time. Hence, we are also capable of measuring transnational solidarity’s effect on Eurosceptic voting against the backdrop of the Refugee Crisis in an economically weak setting. As a consequence, Greece is predestined for examining the influence of transnational solidarity in times of multiple European crises.