As the salience of ‘democratic backsliding’ in member states of the European Union (EU) increases, preferences inside EU institutions about whether to sanction such governments that breach liberal democratic principles diverge. Anecdotal evidence suggests that party politics play a key role in determining attitudes towards sanctions: parties strategically protect target governments that belong to their European party family. This paper conducts a systematic analysis of this claim. I examine a most-likely case for partisan politics – the position of political groups in the European Parliament. The paper uses fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to explain the positions towards backsliding in Hungary (since 2010), Romania (in 2012), and Poland (since 2015). Initial evidence suggests that party politics indeed matter, but they cannot be reduced to ideological distance (in Left/Right terms) as anecdotal evidence suggests. Instead, preferences towards sanctions are the result of conjectural causation, in which parties’ commitment to liberal democracy as well as their attitudes towards European integration also play a role. This finding implies that specific partisan configurations are more conducive to generating majorities in favour of sanctions.
