Economic Crisis and Renationalisation of the EU Governance System: Do Parties Respond to Increasing Euroscepticism and Nationalism Among Citizens by Getting Back Control?

Previous analyses have confirmed that party responsiveness has been affected by the economic and financial crisis. This has occurred not only on the left-right dimension (i.e. Clements et al. 2018a) but also on specific policy dimensions relating to positions towards the EU. When considering the latter, previous works have shown that the growth of euroskepticism among EU citizens during the crisis has driven parties to shift their positions in the same direction and thus increase party responsiveness (Rohrschneider and Whitefield 2015; Spoon and Williams 2015; Williams and Spoon 2017; Clements et al. 2018b). This paper follows this line of work, focusing on whether changes in the level of euroscepticism and nationalism among citizens have also driven shifts in support of a more intergovenrmnetal and less supranational EU. Based on existing evidence for domestic political elites (Marangoni and Russo 2018), we hypothesize that the increase in euroscepticism and nationalism among the public during the crisis has provoked that the preferences of parties concerning the institutional architecture of the EU have moved away from those options involving a reinforcement of supranational governance (reinforcement of the EP and/or the EC) towards options priming the central role of member states – that is, a renationalization of EU by repatriating the control over policy decisions. In addition, we also expect that such nationalistic turn will be more accentuated in those countries more affected by the crisis, in particular in those countries which had to resort to some kind of financial assistance programme during the crisis period. We will test this hypothesis using data from the Euromanifesto Study as a source for party positions and the European Social Survey and the European Election Studies to capture public Euroscepticism and nationalism. Our study has important implications for the future of the European integration process.