Beyond Polity: EU Policy Preferences and Voting Behavior in Western and Central Europe

Over the last decades, EU integration has emerged as a source of political conflict, influencing party strategies and voting preferences across most member states. Parties, both Europhile and Eurosceptic, have increasingly emphasized and polarized their positions along the pro-/anti-European dimension of political competition, while voters have become more likely to respond electorally to these informational shortcuts. A substantial body of scholarship highlights that EU-related matters are inherently multifaceted, commonly distinguishing between EU constitutive/polity issues and EU policy issues. EU constitutive/polity issues concern the foundational characteristics of the EU’s political system, including questions of EU membership, the allocation of competences among EU institutions, and the overall legitimacy and complexity of the European integration process. By contrast, EU policy issues relate to how EU institutions exercise their competences in everyday policymaking across various domains, such as immigration, social, economic, and environmental policy. While acknowledging the potential relevance of EU policy issues for party competition, existing research has primarily focused on the effects of EU polity issues on voting behavior, largely overlooking the role of EU policy preferences. This paper seeks to address this gap by assessing the impact of both EU polity and EU policy issues on citizens’ voting behavior in seven EU member states—Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the Netherlands. The analysis relies on a novel public opinion dataset capturing citizens’ attitudes across a wide range of EU policy domains, including immigration, environmental protection, defense, foreign affairs, and socio-economic policy. Using regression analysis, the study examines the extent to which support for or opposition to EU polity and policy issues shapes voting preferences across different party families, namely social democratic, Christian democratic, green, liberal, conservative, radical left, and radical right parties. It is expected that both EU policy and EU polity issues constitute important sources of political conflict, with their relevance clearly reflected in electoral dynamics among both Eurosceptic and Europhile party families.