Envisioning a regulatory or a redistributive polity - EU polity ideas and mainstream party ideology between 2009 and 2019

Throughout the EU’s ‘polycrisis’ of the last decade mainstream parties have remained mostly supportive of European Integration. However, they developed increasingly different ideal-typical polity ideas for the integration of the core state powers that produced most of the crises. The regulatory polity encourages national self-reliance and regards EU institutions as rule enforces. Its adherents preferred to solve the Eurozone crisis through the stricter enforcement of deficit rules or the Migration crisis through stricter border management regulation. The redistributive polity builds on transnational solidarity and the creation of EU-level capacities for burden-sharing. Its proponents preferred Eurobonds and an EU-level border force. We study how mainstream parties’ ideology shapes their preference for either a regulatory or redistributive integration mode of core state powers. We study this on voting advice application positioning data for mainstream parties in all EU member states for the three EU elections between 2009 and 2019. We show that mainstream parties across the socio-economic left-right and the socio-cultural liberal and conservative dimension increasingly promote different kinds of European integration. We argue that this growing rift provides voters with an increasingly meaningful choice between different normative conceptions of the EU.