Sovereignist reactions of political parties to challenging times

The European Union (EU) and its member states are witnessing highly politicized times with increasing levels of polarization over major European policy issues. These recent developments are reflected at both the national and the EU level of governance. In line with this, we can observe a striking rise of Euroscepticism all over Europe. Compared to the 1990s, the two most recent elections in 2014 and 2019 depict the strongest support for Eurosceptic parties in the history of these elections. Increasing levels of polarization of European societies, but in particular growing support for Eurosceptic parties signifies a decreasing support for the idea of European integration. This latest development contrasts with the paths taken towards more international and supranational cooperation and can be understood as a call for more national sovereignty. Sovereignist reactions reflect the wish of ‘getting back control’ by some groups of the electorate and accordingly by national political actors. Against this background, and drawing on MARPOR data [coding categories: internationalism (negative) and European Union (negative)], the aim of our paper is twofold. In a first descriptive step, we seek to investigate how much emphasis has been put on sovereignist issues in the different EU member states and whether this has changed in the shadow of the last decade’s multiple crises. Moreover, we map how much different party families stress sovereignist issues over time. In the second part of the paper, we study via multivariate analyses the reasons for sovereignist issue emphasis in Europe. Based on a two-dimensional conceptualization of political sphere, our main assumption is that the public mood (i.e. public opinion) in terms of major economic and cultural concerns determines the desire for more sovereignity to an important degree. The descriptive findings of our paper show that the emphasis on sovereignist issues is rather low in most EU member states, although there is variation over time and countries. However, the most telling part of the paper concerns the multivariate analyses. The latter will help us to better understand whether sovereignist issue emphasis is only related to party-based factors or reflects a broader wish of the society to call for sovereignist reactions.