From One Crisis to Another: How Transnational Conflict Lines Shape the European Parliament

In the past years, we witnessed changes in the dimensionality of European parties’ and voters’ political space. The European Union (EU) dimension did not only gain significantly in salience (Hooghe and Marks, 2017) but it also moved from being associated only with purely cultural attitudes to also structuring economic attitudes (Otjes and Katsanidou, 2017). Given that the quality of representation in the European Parliament (EP) is very sensitive to national-level dynamics and utlimately dependent on a two-step sorting of policy choices (Lefkofridi and Katsanidou, 2014), how do these changes affect it? To what extent do recent changes in the dimensionality of the political space impact the quality of representation in the EP? As Lefkofridi and Katsanidou (2018) showed there is a competition within the EP as European Party Groups (EPGs) capture both sides of the spectrum in important issue. In this paper we examine political representation at the EU level in two stages: first, we examine which issues matter most for voters’ choices of national parties in European elections; and second, we analyze which issues drive the sorting of national parties in EPGs. More specifically, we observe the role of outliers over time: do national member parties with positions deviant from the median “assimilate” or are they the trend-setters for the future? This is particularily interesting in the study of Euroscepticism as a cross-cutting element of many EPGs. We study representation through two European elections (2009 and 2014) by utilizing data on political party positions (EUProfiler and EUandI) and on voter positions (European Election Study); in detail, we examine three issue dimensions: economic left-right, immigration and EU integration. Our findings will address the wider question on whether a reconfiguration of traditional cleavage lines is taking place across Europe thus redefining representation in the EP.