Solidarity or Self-reliance? Mainstream party ideology and the European integration of core state powers

How have mainstream political parties positioned themselves on the European integration of core state powers (Genschel & Jachtenfuchs 2016)? While mainstream parties have historically been united in their support for the EU (Aspinwall 2002), core state power integration has produced two competing notions of future European integration (Freudlsperger and Weinrich 2021). On one hand, there is the image of a European regulatory polity that avoids costly capacity-building and hinges on the self-reliance of individual member states (Majone, 1996). On the other hand, there is the notion of a redistributive polity relying on transnational solidarity. In this paper, we test whether and how the emergence of these competing polity ideas has caused a realignment of mainstream party’s positionings on European integration. Informed by the recent literature on the nexus between party ideology and European integration (Prosser 2016, Schäfer et al. 2021), we argue, first, that mainstream parties openly support either of the two polity ideas primarily in situations in which an EU sectoral policy is electorally salient and, secondly, that economic left and socio-culturally liberal parties are more likely to support the build-up of a redistributive polity than right and conservative parties. We test these hypotheses on a data set of 1,594 distinct policy positions taken by parliamentarians in the German Bundestag between 2002 and 2019. Employing logistic regression, our analysis shows on one hand that German mainstream parties’ pro-European consensus holds. On the other, it is increasingly permeated by profound and visible disagreements about the nature and purpose of the EU. Whereas parties of the mainstream left show themselves open for transnational solidarity and the gradual build-up of a European redistributive polity, parties of the mainstream right cling to the notion of a regulatory European policy even under the conditions of recent years’ polycrisis.