The Valence Side of the EU: Advocating for National Interests in Europe

In the last decades, many challenger parties have tried to mobilize a conflict on European integration, increasing their entrepreneurial efforts on EU issues. In fact, the permissive consensus on integration policies has progressively vanished, with citizens expressing polarized attitudes towards the EU. As a consequence, the issue competition on European integration has been mainly conceived as a positional struggle, where voter/party preferences are ordered along a Pro-/-Anti-EU general dimension. However, some parties may be prone to deploy a different strategy, mobilizing valence aspects related to the EU. These strategies revolve around party competence in advocating for national interests at the EU level, which has been considered as a generally desired goal of domestic electorates. Relying on their claimed superior competence to defend national interests within the EU, parties adopt a valence frame on the EU to avoid divisions within their electorates. However, it is still unclear how much and whether the voters have electorally responded to EU valence issues. This paper advances the following questions: Have EU valence issues affected electoral preferences? Have EU valence issues outweighed the EU positional ones in explaining the voting preferences? Which parties have been more likely to benefit from EU valence issues? To answer these questions, we use an innovative dataset, the Issue Comparative Competition Project (2017-2018), including information on voters’ attitudes on a number of issues. Most importantly, the dataset has tapped public opinion attitudes on both EU positional and valence issues in Italy and France. We employ regression analyses on a stacked data matrix, which allow us to test rival models and assess the impact of EU positional and valence issues on voting choices. Finally, we evaluate which parties (mainstream vs challengers) have capitalized the most on EU valence issues.