Renationalisation of the EU Governance System: Party Responsiveness Through Getting Back Control

Previous analyses have confirmed that party responsiveness has been affected by the economic and financial crisis hitting European Union (EU) countries in the last years of the 2000s. This has occurred not only on the left-right dimension (i.e. Clements, Nanou and Real-Dato 2018a) but also on specific policy dimensions relating to positions towards the European Union, where the growth of euroskeptic and nationalistc views among EU citizens during the crisis has driven parties to shift their positions in the same direction (Braun, Popa and Schmitt 2019). This paper continues this line of work, focusing on a specific aspect of party responsiveness on the EU dimension. Thus, we are interested in whether changes in the levels of euroscepticism and nationalism among citizens have also driven shifts in the positions of parties on the institutional architecture of the EU and, more specifically, their preferences regarding the powers of national governments and other EU institutions in decision-making processes. Evidence from domestic political elites suggests that during the crisis the proportion of national MPs preferring a more federal architecture (strengthening the role of the European Parliament and/or the European Commission while reducing the role of the Council of the EU) has decreased, while those opting for combining federal and intergovernmental elements, or directly prefering more intergovernmentalism (increasing the role of national governments states as the centre of the EU decisions) have gained more supporters (Marangoni and Russo 2018). In this paper, using data from Euromanifestos and European Election Survey we test whether these dynamics also apply to political parties' responsiveness concerning their preferences on the institutional architecture of the EU.