Economic Evaluations, Responsibility Attributions, and Voting for Eurosceptic Parties

The theory of economic voting has been successfully applied to elections on different electoral levels. Less attention has been paid, however, to how economic evaluations influence the vote choice in European elections. This gap exists for two reasons. First, the EU does not have an elected executive branch, making it difficult for voters to punish or reward politicians on the European level, as there is no clear incumbent coalition. Second, traditionally, voters are asked how they perceive the economic situation either of their own family or of the country they live in, as it would be too cognitively demanding to assume that voters have accurate perceptions of economic conditions in the EU as a whole. In this paper, we examine economic voting in European elections. We address the main challenges in this literature in two ways. First, while there might not be a clear executive incumbent, voters can still express their evaluations by voting for parties that either support or oppose to further European integration. Second, building on the literature on responsibility attributions, we argue that voters might perceive the EU to be more or less responsible for the economic conditions within their own country. We examine support for Eurosceptic parties and hypothesis that voters with negative evaluations of the economy in their country will be more likely to support anti-EU parties, but only if they consider the EU to be responsible for these conditions. Analyses using the data from the European Election Studies provide strong support for our expectation.