Eurosceptic Voting after COVID-19: Estimating the Effect of the Pandemic on Euroscepticism in the 2024 EU-Election

The COVID-19-pandemic had a distinct impact on the voting behaviour of individuals in several countries with radical anti-establishment parties sometimes losing but also occasionally gaining votes (Bayerlein and Metten, 2022; Bobba and Hubé, 2021; Wondreys and Mudde, 2020). While studies already address the pandemic’s effect on national- and regional-level voting behaviour, studies analysing the EU-level are surprisingly scarce. This is especially noteworthy, since past crises have often led to surges in Euroscepticism (Serricchio et al., 2013; Stockemer et al., 2020; Pirro et al., 2018). Due to the prominence of the EU in coordinating the pandemic response, the pandemic could have a profound impact on individual levels of Euroscepticism. Focusing on the changes in the vote share of Eurosceptic parties between the EU elections of 2019 and 2024, I answer the following question: How did the COVID-19-pandemic affect regional Euroscepticism? Previous research already showed that vote choices and public opinion towards governments during COVID-19 was often determined by the evaluation of the pandemic response (Lazarus et al., 2020) and individual affectedness (Clarke et al., 2021) as well as conspiracy believes (Romer and Jamieson, 2021) often fuelled by political actors (McKee et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2020). Irrespective of this, the effects of individual affectedness on Euroscepticism have yet to be worked out. The few existing studies show that the perceived inadequacy of the EU’s response has the potential to increase Euroscepticism (Fontana, 2020) with populist leaders like Victor Orbán being able to utilize the pandemic for their Eurosceptic narratives (Hlousek and Havlik, 2023). Simultaneously, a positive perception of the EU’s response in general and the NextGenerationEU fund are likely to increase EU support (Heermann et al., 2023). My empirical analysis utilizes a Difference-in-Differences design with the average excess mortality on the NUTS-3-level during the pandemic as a continuous treatment.