The Economic Factors Giving Rise to Eurosceptic Political Parties in EU Member States, 1997-2015

Abstract

For decades researchers have been linking economic factors to euroscepticism, or sentiments against European integration, by measuring euroscepticism with results from public opinion polls. This paper analyzes how economic factors are linked to euroscepticism when euroscepticism is measured by vote shares going to hard eurosceptic political parties in EU member states’ national legislature elections. Through a series of tests, it finds statistically significant relationships between two economic factors—unemployment rates and debt-to-GDP ratios—and eurosceptic vote shares for the 1997-2015 period. However, when regressions are run on pre- and postcrisis subsets of the initial dataset, for the 1997-2007 period and the 2008-2015 period, the two variable relationships established as significant for the 1997-2015 period are not significant for the pre-crisis period, 1997-2007, but are for the post-crisis period, 2008- 2015. When regressions are run on Eurozone and non-Eurozone subsets of the initial dataset, the results suggest that the significant relationship found between debt-to-GDP ratios and eurosceptic vote shares for the initial EU-wide dataset is largely the result of Eurozone observations while the significant relationship found between unemployment rates and eurosceptic vote shares for the initial EU-wide dataset is largely the result of non-Eurozone observations.