The Eurozone crisis has drawn attention to how far the integration process has progressed and served to re-focus debate on how this process has affected the availability of policy choices in member states. This paper examines whether increasing debate over the future and form of the EU - the politicization of the EU - can be attributed to a decrease in congruence between government policy, party positions and voter preferences. We argue that greater politicization of the EU and increase in Euroscepticism during the crisis can be explained by an increase in the distance between the positions offered by political parties and citizens’ preferences on the EU and left-right dimensions. Using cross-national survey data and party manifesto data for elections occurring before and during the crisis, we examine variation in congruence between the median voter and parties’ positions on these two dimensions.
