Still Europeanists? A Careful Look at Mainstream Parties’ EU Positions

As mainstream parties are influential policy makers in the European Union, their EU positions have important implications for voter representation. However, knowledge about their EU positions is surprisingly incomplete. Often, they are simply considered pro-European. While this might be true for their overall EU positions, such crude measures potentially hide EU-criticism at the level of specific sub-issues. Therefore, this paper divides European integration into sub-issues and analyzes mainstream party positions at this nuanced level. I expect EU-criticism to be strongest on those sub-issues where traditional party ideologies conflict with the expected outcomes of EU integration. Furthermore, this criticism is expected to be reinforced by increasing politicization because pro-European positions become electorally more costly in the face of declining public EU support and Eurosceptic challenger parties. These two hypotheses are tested with detailed data on EU positions of mainstream parties from six countries over the past 40 years.