Hard-line Euroscepticism appears to be, nowadays, a persistent phenomenon of the later stages of European integration. However, it is unclear to what extent economic insecurities, growing numbers of immigrants and/or exclusive national identities play a role in determining the people’s choice to actually support hard-line Eurosceptic parties with their vote. Building upon the existing body of literature on the economic determinants of voting for anti-European parties, this study brings the analysis further by breaking down the electoral performance of strictly Eurosceptic parties at regional level. Approaching the problem at regional level holds several advantages: it allows for a more detailed understanding of unemployment and de-industrialization patterns, accounting for within-country variations otherwise lost in national-level analysis; it allows for a larger database, overcoming the inherent small-N problem when looking at electoral outcomes; and it helps reducing the bias due to potential environmental fallacy. Against this background, we build a dataset including the regionally- distributed results of all electoral episodes (regional, national, European) between 2007 and 2015 in Germany, Italy, Austria, France and Greece for a total of 580 elections. The selection of country-cases is informed by a multi-criterion choice, in order to include federal and no-federal, founding and newer, programme and non-programme as well as core and periphery countries of the European Union. Methodologically, the paper adopts panel-level econometrics.
