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*Preliminary Draft, Please do not cite without authors' permission

The institutional and political roots of the electoral rise of the

Euroskeptic parties

Stefano Camatarri (stefano.camatarri@unimi.it)

Francesco Zucchini (francesco.zucchini@unimi.it)

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND POLITICAL SCIENCES

Università degli Studi di Milano

Abstract

The last European elections were characterized by a growth in many countries of the percentage of

votes in favor of Euroskeptic parties. However this growth has not been uniform. While for example

the Euroskeptic parties have obtained 30.9% of votes in Italy and 34.4% in the Netherlands, in

Germany they have not exceeded 8% and they were essentially absent in Spain (De Sio et al. 2014).

The macroeconomic conditions have probably played a key role in increasing the dissatisfaction of a

part of the European electorate towards pro-European Union national governments (Kriesi and

Fernandez 2013; Pirro and Kessel 2013). Nevertheless the growth of euroskepticism concerned

countries with very different macroeconomic performance (e.g. UK and Greece) and it was very

modest or absent in countries with high levels of unemployment and low economic growth (e.g. Spain).

In sum on one side the great variance among European countries suggest the importance of the national

contexts in explaining the success of EUSK parties; on the other side national economic conditions do

not seem to be a very promising explanatory factor.

In this paper we investigate about the role played by a country specific factor different from the

economic performance, the heterogeneity of government coalitions in the policy space (Tsebelis 2002).

We argue that in countries characterized by heterogeneous governments in the last years before EP

elections, above all along the pro-anti EU dimension, citizens were more likely to vote for Euroskeptic

parties. We hypothesize also that the interaction between some individual features and the

heterogeneity of the government play an important role in the explanation. We take advantage of the

2014 EES Voter Study and of EuanDI data set to test our hypotheses that are largely confirmed by

several statistical models. An attempt to apply the same models to the abstention shows that at least

during the last EP elections motivations for euroskeptical vote and abstention are quite different.

Introduction

Last European elections have been characterized by an increase of votes for anti-establishment parties,

that are also very critical with European institutions and European policies. At first glance such a

phenomenon does not look like very surprising. The recent economic and financial crisis has severely

affected a considerable part of the European population. The European institutions and many national

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governments did not seem able to counter unemployment and loss of income. Therefore large sectors of

the electorate could have punished the traditional pro-Europe parties that have been very often also

government parties during the crisis years and just before the EP elections. However a closer

investigation reveals that the country economic performances are not so clearly associated with the

success of the so called euroskeptic parties (from now on EUSK parties). In other terms if the success

of EUSK parties during the last European elections is hardly undeniable, nevertheless in some

countries that experienced a relatively good economic performance these political forces won a very

high percentage of votes (for instance Denmark and Netherlands), while, on the contrary in other

countries that were substantially put under the tutelage of the European institutions and IFM for their

financial and economic conditions, the same type of parties was less successful or even almost a

marginal phenomenon (for instance Portugal and Spain). In Fig.1a and 1b you can contrast the electoral

performance (percent of votes) of EUSK party in each EU country during last EP elections (blue, in

ascending order) according to Maggini, Emanuele and Marino (2014), with the variation of the

employment rate and the median net equivalized income1 between 2009 and 2013. There is no

plausible association.

Fig.1

In sum on one side the great variance among European countries suggest the importance of the national

contexts in explaining the success of EUSK parties; on the other side national economic conditions do

not seem to be a very promising explanatory factor.

1 For a definition see below and at http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics

explained/index.php/Glossary:Equivalised_disposable_income

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In this paper we investigate about the role played by a country specific factor different from the

economic performance. We investigate about the role of the heterogeneity of government coalitions in

the policy space. As a scientific investigation about the factors that encouraged a certain political

behavior ( i.e. the vote for euroskeptic parties) must be conducted at individual level in order to prevent

ecological fallacies , we take advantage of the 2014 EES Voter Study. This research consists of a EU

wide survey which was carried jointly with the post-electoral survey commissioned by the European

Parliament (EP). This large data set has been integrated by information about politics and economy of

each European countries during the crisis period (2009-2014, see below). We argue that in countries

characterized by heterogeneous governments in the last years before EP elections, above all along the

pro-anti EU dimension, citizens have been more likely to vote for EUSK parties. We also hypothesize

that the effect of some individual features on the propensity to vote for EUSK parties is in fact

conditioned by the government political heterogeneity. In other terms, our second class of hypotheses is

that the respondents’ subjective perception of personal socio-economic status, self location on left-right

and on pro-anti EU dimensions increasingly affect the probability to vote for EUSK parties more the

government is heterogeneous along the pro-anti EU dimension. And on the other side we hypothesize

that the “positive” effect of an increase of government heterogeneity on the probability to vote for

EUSK party is strengthened when the voter thinks to be at the bottom of the social ladder, places

him/her self on the extreme left of the left –right continuum or he/she refuses any placement and when

he/she reveals non positive attitude towards EU integration. In addition to this, we will also check the

effects of all these possible causal factors on a further dependent variable: non-voting. In fact, as some

previous studies argued, abstainers at the EP elections could be somehow characterized by a “creeping”

Euroskepticism (Hobolt at al. 2008). Our models will try to evaluate such a potential similarity.

In the next section we try to sketch a theoretical account to explain why and how government political

heterogeneity should affect electoral behavior. In the third section we will present the data and the

statistical analysis used to test our hypotheses. In the fourth section we will analyze abstention. Final

section will be dedicated to a discussion of the main results.

A theoretical account

According to a standard issue voting model the voter would compare the party platforms and he/she

would vote for the party that proposes the platform closest to his/her ideal point. Such a naïve and

pretty rough way to represent the not so simple act of voting assumes that all parties are evaluated for

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their promises and previous government achievements do not matter. In other words the status quo

policy as well as the feasible policy change would not be taken in consideration by the citizens when

they vote.

The limits and lack of realism of this description has been noticed for quite long time. According to

Grofman (1985) a voter could prefer a party that does not have the closest platform to his/her ideal

point if the promised change of the status quo is in the right direction for the voter. The obstacles that

this party will face in implementing its platform are the fundamental ingredient that allows to

seemingly violate the downsian criterion of proximity. If, because of these obstacles, the expected new

status quo does not correspond to the party’s platform but to somehow a more moderate version of this

platform, then the voter could rationally vote for this party instead of voting for another party that

proposes a platform closer to his/her ideal point but on the opposite side with respect to the status quo.

Grofman did not specify the nature of these obstacles but it is not difficult to imagine as obstacles to a

full implementation of party platforms the divided government in US political system and the coalition

governments in European democracies. More recently Kedar (2005) in a similar vein has argued (and

empirically tested) that precisely in countries where policy is often the result of institutionalized

multiparty bargaining , votes are watered down by power sharing. Therefore voters would often

compensate for this watering down by supporting parties whose positions differ from their own and are

more extremist, insofar these parties pull policy in a desired direction. Both scholars hypothesize that

citizens vote to achieve outcomes. While according to Grofman opposition and extremist parties are

made (paradoxically) attractive also for voters who are ideologically closer to the incumbent party by

obstacles that prevent them to fully implement their extremist platform, according to Kedar the same

parties are made attractive, insofar as they pull policy in the desired direction, by obstacles that prevent

an incumbent (government) party to fully keep its electoral promises. Moreover, Kedar specifies the

institutional and political nature of the obstacles. Differently from majoritarian democracies, in the

consensual political systems a winning party has to compromise with other political forces to form a

government and to pass important legislation in parliament. The voter is conscious about the real

working of this type of political systems and will compensate the too moderate effect of a “sincere”

voting by choosing more extremist parties even when he/she is not at all an extremist. Kedar

explanation (and implicitly also the Grofman model) considers the compromise that attenuates the

importance of the policy change as the main effect of a power sharing political system that the voters

perceive. Voters would vote for extremist parties in order to compensate this prospective outcome and

to shift the content of this compromise as near as possible to their ideal point (that is not necessarily

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very close to extremist party platform). However a such expectation takes the risk to be is misplaced.

Kedar presumes that voters are “prospective” but the theory that they are supposed to adopt in order to

anticipate the policy effect of their vote is wrong. The “compensational mechanism” implies a

description of decision making process of the parliamentary democracies questionable and not very

attuned with the recent and established spatial theories of law making (Cox & McCubbins 2005,

Tsebelis 2002). Unless the vote for extreme party creates the condition for a complete change of

government majority, the increase of consensus for an extremist party does not generate a (relatively)

more radical change and in some circumstances increases the policy stability. In fact power sharing

systems are mostly characterized by gridlock and high level of policy stability. A spatial representation

can help to illustrate why the compensational mechanism is bound to fail according to spatial theories

of law making

Fig.2

Imagine that in a country ( fig.1) at time t0, just before new elections the government is formed by

party L and party R. SQ is the position of the status quo and EL is a leftist opposition party.

Government can enjoy a strong or a weak positive agenda setting power. It has always a gatekeeping

power. Each government party is a veto player and can prevent an unpleasant change. At time t1

elections take place and voter V has to decide which party to vote. If he/she votes for L , the closest

party, then he/she expects that median voter in parliament will be M. If the government agenda setting

power is strong and L and R after the elections form again the new government then SQ will be

changed and the final outcome will be on the line that connect R and M ( as for construction M=SQ-R).

On this line there are all alternatives that are considered by both R and L better than SQ. The precise

point will depend of the relatively strength of the R versus L. If, on the contrary government does not

have strong positive agenda setting power then the final outcome will correspond always to M, namely

the parliamentary median voter’s ideal point. According to the compensational mechanism V could take

in consideration the possibility to vote EL in order to shift the parliamentary median voter’s ideal point

and to win the most preferred policy. However now, if for instance V is the new median voter, L and R

are still the two government parties and government does not enjoy a strong agenda setting power then

SQ will be preserved as the ideal point of V will be much worse for R. However for L SQ is much

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worse than M , the outcome that he/she expect to receive if he/she voted L . If the government enjoys a

strong agenda setting power then the outcome will be the same outcome of the previous scenario. In

short, the compensational mechanism does not compensate anything ( if we assume strong positive

agenda setting power) or produces an even worse result (if we assume weak positive agenda setting

power) .

We do agree with Kedar that the nature of political system affects the voting behavior. However we do

not think that voters consider consciously the institutional features of their democracy when they vote

in order to figure out the next possible policy outcomes. And if they did it then the compensational

mechanism would be counterproductive. On the contrary we assume that voters evaluate

retrospectively the policy outcomes of the incumbent parties as they were their real electoral platforms

and compare them with the platforms of the opposition parties. We think that these assumptions are

plausible in general and even more plausible when you study the EP elections, given their nature of

second order elections (Hix and Holland 2013) .

Differently from Kedar we do not consider the Lijphart’s type of democracy (consensual versus

majoritarian) where the citizens live as the political country factor that affects the individual voting

decisions. In tune with the main spatial theories of law making we consider the effect of the “spatial”

heterogeneity of the government coalition before the elections. As we have already said we assume, by

following veto players theory (Tsebelis 2002), that if a change of status quo decreases the policy utility

of one government party then this change will be precluded. Therefore when the heterogeneity is high

then there are more status quo policies that cannot be changed (or that can be only marginally

changed). Such a circumstance makes much less credible the electoral promises of the government

parties that are farer from the present status quo policies and encourages voters that otherwise would

have voted for them to choose the opposition extremist parties . A spatial illustration can clarify the

causal mechanism we have in mind.

Imagine that at time t0 a new government is formed. Given the status quo SQ the government at time t1

will decide about the change (or preservation) of SQ. At time t2 the voter V has to vote. In the political

system there are three parties. A rightist party R, a leftist party L and an extreme leftist party EL. L is

the party closest to V and V is moderately leftist. There are three possible scenarios (a, b, c):

a) at time t0 the government is a one party government. At time t1 SQ will be changed. The new status

quo will correspond to the ideal point of the government party. Regardless of which party is in

government (L or R) V at time t2 will vote always for L.

b) at time t0 L and R form an new government. At time t1 the change of SQ is bargained between L and

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R. V will attribute to L as real platform the outcome of this bargaining. Therefore if the new status quo

is closer to V than the EL’s proposal V will still vote for L, otherwise he/she will vote for EL.

c) at time t0 L and R form a new government. R is more distant from L than in scenario b and the

government is more heterogeneous. At time t1 SQ will be preserved as now any change of SQ is for at

least one government party Pareto inferior. At time t2 V will vote for EL as SQ is much farer than EL

platform.

Fig.3

The three scenarios indicate quite well that any increase of government “heterogeneity” increases also

the propensity of some voters to vote for extremist parties. On one side a growth in government

heterogeneity increases also voter’s radicalization in the voting choice as far as the voter is sufficiently

far from the status quo. On the other side the voter’s perception of the status quo as increasingly far

from his/her ideal point and/or the voter’s political radicalization have different chances to be translated

in an extremist vote according to different level of government heterogeneity. If the voter’s ideal point

shift to L position , voter won’t change his electoral choice in scenario a but he/she will vote for EL in

the scenarios b and c .

We believe that this very simple model can be directly applied to explain the various performances of

EUSK parties during the last European elections. The implications of our model can be summarized in

the three following hypotheses:

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1) Government heterogeneity in the dimension “EU Integration” affects positively the probability

that voters vote for Euroskeptic parties.

2) An increase of government heterogeneity has a larger and significant effect on the EUSK vote

more the voter is extremist and more he/she dislikes the present status quo.

3) An increase in political (and social) radicalization of voters is more likely to be translated in an

increase of probability to vote EUSK parties when the heterogeneity of governments is high.

Data

In order to test the hypotheses outlined above, we rely on the most recent post-electoral study at the

European level, the 2014 EES Voter Study. Such study presents the clear advantage of gathering

information about electoral behavior in all the EU countries in a single dataset and it has been

specifically thought and planned for the EP elections. The sample has approximately 30.000

interviewees, and data collection has been done via CAPI 2. Moreover, since country contexts appear as

coded variables, national aspects could be easily added to the data set. As anticipated, these aspects

mainly concern macroeconomic conditions and government political heterogeneity. Macroeconomic

conditions are inferred from Eurostat data regarding employment rate and median net income for the

time span 2009-2013, while the government political heterogeneity is calculated on the basis of party

stands that are derived from the recent EUandI expert survey dataset.

The dependent variable

As the aim of this paper is to analyze the current determinants of euroskeptic vote, we derived our

dependent variable from reported electoral choice at the 2014 European elections. In the 2014 ESS

Voter Study respondents were asked, “Which party did you vote for in these recent European

Parliament elections?”. after which they were presented with the names of the parties deemed as more

relevant in their political systems. In order to classify the parties as euroskeptic we decided not to rely

on voters' opinion on European integration as a criterion of classification (e.g. De Vries and Van Spanje

2 The sample is not a simple random sample of European voters but a disproportionate stratified random sample, with about

1.100 respondents from each EU country, with the exceptions of Malta and Luxembourg, where the sample size is about 50.

Given the huge variation in country size between United Kingdom at one extreme and Luxembourg at the other, this is very

disproportionate. However, such strategy provides the necessary database for identifying national differences in voting

behavior . “ A sample of the same size designed simply to maximize inference to the European electorate would have far too

few individuals to assess the extent to which voters in Ireland, or Denmark, or Sweden fitted the European model as well as

those in France, The Netherlands or Finland” (Marsh 2002, 12).

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2011), but rather to look at expert judgments. Precisely, we drew inspiration from the categorization by

Maggini, Emanuele and Marino (2014), who stated the euroskeptic nature of 63 parties from 23

European countries starting from the score they obtained on issues related to European integration and

– when available – on the attitudes toward the Euro according to four well-known expert survey

datasets: Benoit and Laver (2006), Chapel Hill (2010), ParlGov (2012) and EUandI (2014).3

Differently from them we referred only to EUandI, the most recent expert survey, as we were interested

to capture also the nature of completely new parties. This provides, in fact, party-positions on 28

Europe-wide issues measured in Likert scales, covering a very large proportion of current policies and

political attitudes in the 28 EU member states.4 Since some of these statements strictly concern

European integration in the format of traditional survey questions such as “European integration is a

good thing”, we could easily try to categorize each party according to its level of agreement on them.

Again following Emanuele, Maggini and Marino (2014), we distinguished between Euro countries and

non Euro countries. Indeed, for parties that belong to Euro countries Euro currency has been the most

important issue to understand their Europhile/Euroskeptic position while for parties that belong to non

Euro countries the crucial question that we have considered was about the European integration. We

assessed party euroskepticism in different ways because while inside the Eurozone a possible exit

strategy from the Euro is perceived as a salient and divisive issue, outside the Eurozone the single

currency would find a widespread opposition by any party. Therefore in Euro countries parties with an

high level of agreement with the sentence “The european single currency is a bad thing” were classified

as euroskeptic as well as , in non Euro countries, parties with a low level of agreement with the

sentence “European integration is a good thing. (i.e. assuming a value higher or lower than the

midpoint of their Likert scales).

Such an operational choice clearly has an impact on the kind of euroskepticism we are going to focus

on. Scholars are used to distinguish between hard and soft euroskepticism. While soft Euroskepticism is

referred to a contingent objection to the EU's current or future planned trajectory and policies, hard

euroskepticism might be defined as a principled opposition to the pillars of the european project

(Szczerbiak and Taggart 2003). Party positions on Euro and, more in general on European integration

help us to identify parties that are “hard” euroskeptic . We do not deny the variety of issues,

motivations and ideological positions that characterizes current euroskeptic parties (e.g. Trieb 2014).

3 To be precise, each of these data sources provides measurements basing on specific response scales. Respectively, we

Benoit and Laver (2006) rely on 0-20 scales, Chapel Hill (2010) on 1-7, 0-10, ParlGov (2012) on 0-10 and finally the

EUandI dataset on 1-5.

4 These 28 Europe-wide statements were developed by the scientific coordinators of EUandI and have been extensively

discussed by numerous experts in the field in order to make them as precise, clear and meaningful as possible.

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Nevertheless, we believe that focusing only on parties that explicitly refuse European integration fit

very well with our hypotheses. After all the support for these parties can be easily interpreted as a

evidence of voters’ radicalization.

Since defecting EP elections has been sometimes associated to euroskepticism (Hobolt et al. 2009), we

included the related question in our analyses as source for a further dependent variable. In the 2014

ESS Voter Study respondents have been asked,“[…] Did you yourself vote in the recent European

Parliament elections?”. We will contrast the respondents who filled the “I did not vote” answer with all

those that voted for non EUSK parties. Indeed, as we are interested in comparing abstentionism and

euroskeptic voting we have to contrast them with the same alternative type of behavior (vote for EUSK

parties)

Independent and control variables

As we argued in the theoretical section, the main independent variable is the government ideological

heterogeneity. In tune with the spatial theory of voting our measure of heterogeneity is “spatial”. We

considered the party positions of European parties on a series of policy issues according to the Euandi

expert survey. (http://www.eui.eu/Projects/EUDO/euandi/Index.aspx) In order to infer the main

dimensions of the European electoral competitions and to locate the parties on these dimensions, we

performed a polychoric principal component analysis involving all the 28 statements provided by the

EUandI dataset, then extracting two common factors5.

Several scholars have argued about (at least) a two-dimensionality of EU politics over the last decade,

referring on one side to Left – Right ideology, and to European integration on the other (e.g. Hix and

Lord 1997; Marks and Hooghe 2001). Such expectation is confirmed by the results of our factor

analysis. As a matter of fact, the first two extracted factors explain alone about 55% of the total

variance of the variables involved in the analysis. Moreover, these factors seem to represent relatively

well respectively the Left-Right and the European integration dimension. In particular, while the first

one, D1, is correlated with EUandI’s variables concerning economic and social Left-Right and ethical

issues, the second one, D2, is associated with attitudes toward the EU and immigration. On each

5 The use of polychoric correlations is justified by the fact that the variables under analysis consist in ordinally scaled items

(i.e. 0 = strongly disagree, 1= rather disagree 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = rather agree 5 = strongly agree). In truth,

standard factor analysis is often performed also in the presence of ordinal indicators, such as Likert scales. In this cases, the

scores assigned to the ratings are simply treated as if they were continuous. However, this is unsatisfactory as predicted

values for the observed scores can never be exact integers, whereas the scores assigned to the ratings are exact integers

(McDonald, 1999). The introduction of poliychoric correlations help us in dealing with such problem, since they estimate

the linear relationship between two unobserved continuous variables simply starting from observed ordinal data (Flora and

Curran 2004).

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dimension each party gets a factor score, summarizing its overall position on the whole dimension. In

order to estimate government ideological heterogeneity, we explicitly focused on the scores of those

parties who have been part of a government coalition between (September) 2008 and (April) 2014 in

their country, namely from the official beginning of the financial and economic crisis and the EP

elections. In a first stage, for each dimension, we measured ideological heterogeneity of each

government in each country as the distance among the two parties with the highest and the lowest

factor score in a government coalition. Indeed, the other government parties have been considered as

“absorbed”, since they were located inside the core of the most “extreme” ones (Tsebelis 2002). For

each dimension and each country we consider government coalition ranges as many as the governments

that were in office during the selected period. Then in order to get an overall measure of “spatial”

heterogeneity over time, we calculated the weight in days of each government and computed the

country average coalition range from 2008 to 2014 both in D1 and in D2. The two variables are called

government rangeD1 and government range D2. Not too surprisingly, according to our regression

analyses (see below), the government heterogeneity on dimension D2, namely the dimension most

connected to European integration and immigration, has by far the largest explanatory power.

Therefore we decide to consider only the heterogeneity in this dimension.

The rest of the variables that a priori we suspect to have an explanatory role can be divided into socio-

economic individual variables, political individual variables and contextual (or country) variables.

Among the contextual variables two measures relate respectively to the median equivalised net income

and to the rate of employment. The first measure indicates the median income of an household after the

taxes and after having considered the household composition (in terms of household members’ age)6.

These measures summarize the country economic performances and are politically sensitive indicators.

Both economic measures are considered as absolute value during the year before the election (Median

Net Income 2013 and Employment Rate 2013) and as variation from the beginning of economic crisis

and the year before the EP election (Delta Net Income and Delta Employment Rate). The other country

variable is a dummy variable called “post communist” that is equal to one when the country was in the

past a communist country. As a matter of fact, post-communist environments have been often

associated to limited electoral experiences and low participation (e.g. Schmitt 2004). Since also non-

voting could be interpreted as an alternative way to signal Euroskepticism (Hobolt et al. 2008, see

below), then we expect that in these countries the probability to vote for Euroskeptical parties is low as

the same distaste toward EU is often communicated by the abstention.

6 Using median, rather than mean income, results in a much more accurate picture of the average income of the middle class

since the data will not be skewed by gains and abnormalities in the extreme ends. Median household income is a

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The individual socio- economic variables can be classified in sociotropic evaluations, egotistical

(pocketbook) evaluations, cognitive features and “objective” socio-demogrphic conditions. As

sociotropic evaluations we have considered predictors concerning retrospective and prospective

economic perceptions. The retrospective question wording is “What do you think about the economy?

Compared to 12 months ago, do you think that the general economic situation in our country is a lot

better, a little better, has stayed the same, a little worse, a lot worse”, while the prospective one reads:

“And over the next 12 months, how do you think the general economic situation in our country will be?

Will it get a lot better, a little better, stay the same, get a little worse or get a lot worse?”. Possible

answers to both questions are ranked in a five-level Likert scale. As egotistical perceptions we

considered the evaluation about the personal income and the social position. The first variable

(Decrease in income) corresponds to the answer (yes or no) to the question “Did you or someone in

your household experience a decrease in income in the last two years ?”, while the second variable

(Social Status) regards individual self-placement on the social ladder, measured on a scale from 1 to 10,

where 1 means ‘the lowest level in society’ and 10 means ‘the highest level in society’.

Several studies found that the level of interest in politics and the level of information affect the voting

choice (e.g. Hobolt, Spoon and Tilley 2008). Therefore we consider as “cognitive” variables a dummy

measure of political information (Political information) that is equal to 1 when the respondent follows

the news at least once a week ( on internet or on TV or in the newspapers), a measure of education

that is equal to 1 when the respondent continued to study after the age of 15 (Education), and a measure

of political interest (Political Interest) that is equal to 1 when the respondent is at least moderately

interested in politics. As socio-demographic variables we take in consideration age, gender , place of

residence and occupational condition. The latter is a dummy variable that is equal to one when the

respondent is a unemployed, manual worker or housekeeper. The place of residence is classified as

“Rural area or village, Small or middle sized town, Large town.

Last but not least we have considered also as very powerful and direct predictors of the vote behavior

some long-standing predispositions to support political parties of different leanings. With reference to

political attitude toward European Union (Attitude toward EU) we focus on the “utilitarian”

dimension of the concept (e.g. Lubbers and Scheepers 2005, 2010). In the 2014 EES questionnaire it is

well represented by the following question:“Generally speaking, do you think that our country’s

membership of the EU is a good thing, a bad thing or neither a good thing nor a bad thing?”.Our

respondent has been considered negatively (or non positively) oriented towards European Union when

he/she does not answer that EU is a good thing. The other variable , Ideology, is the answer to the

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following questions: “In political matters people talk of “the left” and “the right”. What is your

position? Please use a scale from 0 to 10, where’ 0’ means ‘left’ and ‘10’ means ‘right’. Which number

best describes your position?”. In our analyses this variable has been dichotomized, so to clearly

contrast leftist voters ( respondents who locate themselves between 1 and 3) and voters who refuse to

locate themselves on left-right dimension. - with all other voters. This dummy variable (Left & not

located) has been suggested by a very similar voting behavior of this two seemingly very different

classes of voters.

Empirical analysis

The nature of data we analyze implies that individual observations are not completely independent

from each other, as they are nested into a superior level, the country, to which each respondent belongs.

This inclusion could lead to residuals that are not independent within the same country. If we used

ordinary regressions then the standard errors and the significance of coefficients would be respectively

under and overestimated. In order to make our analyses reliable, we applied multi-level logistic

regression analysis to EES data.

We present two classes of regression models. In the first one we consider all socio-economic individual

variables and country variables. The second class of models includes also the political individual

variables. The country economic variables are taken in consideration alternatively to avoid

collinearity7. The government heterogeneity is considered as the government coalition range in one

dimension (the second dimension, pro-anti EU integration)8.

1) Models without political individual variables

The first two models allow to compare the performance of Lijphart first dimension of consensualism

(Lijphart 2012) with the government spatial heterogeneity when we consider as economic country

variable the rate of employment. As Ljiphart did not classify post-communist countries and Cyprus,

these countries are excluded also from our data set. The other two models include the full data set,

alternatively both measures of country economic performance, and the dummy variable Post

7 As all models fit slightly better by considering the employment rate instead of the median equivalised net income without

any substantial difference in the other variable coefficients ,we did not show models with interaction terms that include

median equivalised net income. They are available on request. 8 We considered also the average of the ranges on both dimensions ( Pro-Anti EU and Left-right) as operationalization of the

government heterogeneity . Almost always the hypothesized causal connections are confirmed even if with lower level of

statistical significance.

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Communist. Our first hypothesis seems to be not disconfirmed. Differently from the Ljiphart first

dimension of consensualism, the effect of government heterogeneity is always significant and in the

predicted direction. When the average heterogeneity in terms spatial distance between the two most

extreme government parties increase also the propensity to vote EUSK parties increases. Moreover this

effect is also pretty strong.

Tab 1: The determinants of voting for Euroskeptic parties: random-effects logistic regressions

EMPGOVH EMPLJPH EMP INC EMPint.

Coef se coef Se coef se coef Se Coef se

Individual variables

Gender (female = 1) (d10) -0.366*** 0.065 -0.365*** 0.065 -0.400*** 0.059 -0.400*** 0.059 -0.403*** 0.059

Age (d11)

-0.011*** 0.002 -0.011*** 0.002 -0.011*** 0.002 -0.011*** 0.002 -0.011*** 0.002

2.Place of residence (Small

or middle sized town=1) 0.052 0.081 0.052 0.081 0.058 0.073 0.058 0.073 0.057 0.073

3.Place of residence (Large

town=1) 0.123 0.086 0.123 0.086 0.037 0.078 0.036 0.078 0.036 0.078

Decrease in income (Yes=1)

(qpp11)

0.135** 0.069 0.135** 0.069 0.146** 0.063 0.145** 0.063 0.145** 0.063

Occupational status

(Unemployed, manual

worker, housekeeper=1)

0.278*** 0.075 0.279*** 0.075 0.303*** 0.068 0.302*** 0.068 0.306*** 0.068

Retrospective economic

evaluation (1= Lot worse;

5= Lot better) (qpp15)

-0.241*** 0.044 -0.241*** 0.044 -0.221*** 0.040 -0.221*** 0.040 -0.220*** 0.040

Prospective economic

evaluation (1= Lot worse;

5= Lot better) (qpp16)

-0.235*** 0.045 -0.235*** 0.045 -0.249*** 0.041 -0.249*** 0.041 -0.250*** 0.041

Political Information

(at least once a week = 1)

0.007 0.070 0.008 0.070 -0.053 0.065 -0.052 0.065 -0.053 0.065

Political Interest

(at least moderately

interested = 1)

0.067 0.071 0.068 0.071 0.064 0.065 0.063 0.065 0.062 0.065

Social Status (0=low;

10=high) - (d61)

-0.076*** 0.023 -0.075*** 0.023 -0.089*** 0.021 - 0.089*** 0.021 -0.007 0.046

Education

(after age of 15 = 1) -0.116 0.095 -0.112 0.095 -0.014 0.089 -0.012 0.089 -0.021 0.089

Contextual variables

Post-communist country

(Yes=1)

- - - - -1.721** 0.743 -2.232* 1.179 -1.718** 0.748

Delta Employment Rate

(2009-2013)

-0.309** 0.120 -0.318** 0.131 -0.035 0.096 - - -0.035 0.097

Employment Rate (annual 0.156** 0.063 0.216*** 0.071 0.041 0.072 - - 0.041 0.072

15

Sources: EES Voter Study (2014), EUandI dataset (2014) and EUROSTAT data (2008-2013)

Note: Table entries are not standardized coefficients and standard errors from multilevel logistic regression models. Significant at

***p<0.01, **p<0.05, *p<0.1.

Coeteris paribus an increase of one unit of government heterogeneity implies on average an increase of

around 180% of the probability to vote for an EUSK party in EMP model. On the contrary, (in the

models that are applied to the whole data set) , country economic variables do not seem to play a

significant role. Much more important are the individual perceptions, both the sociotropic and

egotistical ones, about the economic trends. Cognitive variables are not ever significant while being

women decreases the probability to vote for an EUSK party by 33% . On the contrary being a manual

worker, a house keeper or unemployed increases the probability by 36% compared to any other type of

job.

According to our second hypothesis an increase of the government “spatial” heterogeneity has a larger

and significant effect on the “euroskeptic” vote more the voter is extremist and more he/she dislikes the

present status quo, while according to our third hypothesis an increase in extremism and dissatisfaction

with the present status quo is more “effective” in countries with an high government heterogeneity . In

the model EMPi we introduce the interaction between the perceived social status and the government

heterogeneity in order to test these hypotheses without resorting to (strictly speaking) political

variables. The new variable is significant and negative. Fig. 4 illustrate respectively (left panel) the

marginal effect of an increase of the government heterogeneity for different perceived positions of the

social status and (right panel) the marginal effect of an increase of the perceived social status on the

probability to vote for EUSK parties at different levels of government heterogeneity increases.

The government heterogeneity does not seem to have a sufficiently significant effect when the

respondent perceives him/her self as belonging to medium-high position in the society (fig.3) and on

the other side an improvement (worsening) of the perceived social status does not affect negatively

average 2013)

Government Range D2 1.071** 0.477 - - 1.042** 0.481 1.132** 0.450 1.322*** 0.505

Delta Net Income (2009-

2013)

- - - - - - 0.000 0.000 - -

Net Income (2013) - - - - - - -0.000 0.000 - -

LjiphartD1 - - -0.022 0.414 - - - - - -

Interactive terms

Social status X Government

Range D2

- - - - - - - - -0.054** 0.027

Constant -12.182*** 4.472 -

15.063*** 5.070 -3.893 4.840 -0.344 1.358 -4.321 4.872

Number of observations 8159 8159 12028 11759 12028

Log likelihood = -3188.3 -3190.710 -3888.750 -3.887.4 -3886.770

16

(positively) the probability to vote for a EUSK party when the government is very homogenous,

namely when the government range is below 1. Therefore both hypotheses seem to be confirmed when

we equate the dissatisfaction with the status quo with the perception of being in the bottom of the social

ladder.

Fig.4 Conditional Marginal Effects using Model EMPi

0

.05

.1.1

5.2

.25

Effe

cts

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Lowest/highest level in society (self-placement) - (d61)

Average Marginal Effects of govrange2008D2_sum with 95% CIs

2) Models with political individual variables

The political attitudes of voters are very proximate to the voting behavior. Therefore we expect that

they are strongly correlated with the dependent variable and that the coefficients and statistical

significance of some other antecedent factors get weaker. Moreover the closeness of these long

standing factors with the electoral choice allows in our case to at least partially control for the potential

endogeneity of our statistical tests. One can hypothesize that if in a country there is a stable tradition of

euroskeptic vote then all parties, including government parties, try to locate themselves on position

relatively euroskeptic just to keep consensus. By doing it they somehow increase our measure of

government heterogeneity. Therefore we would find that citizens vote EUSK parties just because they

voted for and are favorably oriented toward EUSK parties. However when we introduce very strong

predictors of vote for EUSK parties then this type of endogeneity is at least partially controlled. In

other terms for instance if there was endogeneity, with the inclusion of the attitude towards EU

integration as control, the variable government heterogeneity should lose almost completely strength

and significance. Actually both an agnostic or hostile orientation towards the EU membership and

having a very leftist (or none) self-placement on the left-right continuum are always strong and

significant predictors of the euroskeptical vote. Answering that European Union is not a good thing for

your country increases the probability to vote for EUSK party by more than 250% with respect to

voters positively oriented toward EU. Citizens who are very leftists or not placed on left-right

17

continuum are 33% more likely to vote for a EUSK party than other voters. Nevertheless almost all

causal relationships we have already identified in the previous models are still significant and strong.

The government heterogeneity on the EU dimension is still a very important explanatory factor.

Coeteris paribus an increase of one unit of government heterogeneity implies an increase of probability

to vote for a EUSK by about 170% in all models without interaction terms (EMP and ICSD). However

the most intriguing aspect of this class of models is precisely the interaction between the individual

political attitudes and the government heterogeneity. According to the spatial theory we illustrated in

the second section we expect that the same change in the political attitudes is translated into different

electoral behaviors according to the level of government spatial heterogeneity (Hyp.3) and that an

increase in the government heterogeneity affects weakly and not significantly the propensity to vote for

EUSK parties when the voter does not have a “radical” attitude (namely when he/she rightist or

centrist) or when he/she is not agnostic or hostile to European Integration (Hyp.2). Both hypotheses are

fully confirmed when we consider as political attitude the self-placement on the continuum left-right.

Tab 2: The determinants of voting for Euroskeptic parties: random-effects logistic regressions

EMP INCD EUR LEFTNOTL

Coef se coef se coef se coef Se

Individual variables

Gender (female = 1) (d10)

-0.476*** 0.063 -0.476*** 0.063 -0.473*** 0.063 -0.486*** 0.063

Age (d11)

-0.011*** 0.002 -0.010*** 0.002 -0.011*** 0.002 -0.010*** 0.002

2.Place of residence

(Small or middle sized town=1)

0.062 0.077 0.062 0.077

0.061 0.077 0.071 0.077

3.Place of residence (Large town=1)

0.085 0.083 0.085 0.083 0.081 0.083 0.098 0.083

Decrease in income (Yes=1) (qpp11)

0.113* 0.066 0.112* 0.066 0.112* 0.066 0.107 0.067

Social Status (0=low; 10=high) (d61) -0.048** 0.022 -0.048** 0.022 -0.049** 0.022 -0.047** 0.022

Occupational status (Unemployed,

manual worker, housekeeper=1)

0.236*** 0.072 0.235*** 0.072

0.237*** 0.072 0.228*** 0.072

Retrospective economic evaluation

(1= Lot worse; 5= Lot better)(qpp15)

-0.174*** 0.043 -0.174*** 0.043 -0.177*** 0.043 -0.170*** 0.043

Prospective economic evaluation

(1= Lot worse; 5= Lot better)(qpp16)

-0.154*** 0.044 -0.153*** 0.044 -0.149*** 0.044 -0.162*** 0.044

Political Information

(at least once a week = 1)

-0.001 0.068 0.001 0.068 -0.004 0.068 0.003 0.068

Education (after age of 15 = 1)

0.147 0.096 0.148 0.096 0.152 0.096 0.153 0.096

18

Sources: EES Voter Study (2014), EUandI dataset (2014) and EUROSTAT data (2008-2013)

Note: Table entries are not standardized coefficients and standard errors from multilevel logistic regression models. Significant at

***p<0.01, **p<0.05, *p<0.1.

The positive effect of an increase of government heterogeneity on the vote for EUSK parties is not

significant when the voter is centrist or rightist (Fig. 5 Left panel). The change in political attitudes of

voters, from being centrist and rightist to being leftist or not self placed, is significantly and positively

connected with the vote for EUSK parties only when the government heterogeneity is higher than 1.3

(right panel).

Less clear cut are the results when we consider the attitude towards EU. The increase of government

heterogeneity affects always “significantly” the probability to vote for EUSK parties , irrespectively

from the existence of a non positive attitude toward EU integration, even if this effect is slightly

stronger when there is this attitude (Fig.6 left panel). Similarly the marginal effect of becoming

agnostic or negative oriented toward EU increases “significantly” almost always the probability to vote

for EUSK party even if this propensity is much higher when the government heterogeneity is high

(Fig.6 right panel).

Political Interest

(at least moderately interested = 1)

-0.034 0.069 -0.034 0.069 -0.040 0.069 -0.028 0.069

Left & Not Located (Yes = 1) 0.274*** 0.067 0.274*** 0.067 0.278*** 0.067 -0.356** 0.153

Attitude toward EU (negative = 1) 1.269*** 0.067 1.268*** 0.067 1.631*** 0.155 1.266*** 0.067

Contextual variables

Post-communist country (Yes=1) -1.702** 0.704 -2.172* 1.117 -1.697** 0.702 -1.684** 0.696

Delta Employment Rate (2009-2013) -0.033 0.093 - - -0.032 0.093 -0.044 0.093

Employment Rate (annual average

2013)

0.045 0.068 - - 0.046 0.068 0.048 0.068

Government Range D2 0.919** 0.453 1.018** 0.424 1.061** 0.455 0.765* 0.448

Net Income 2013

- - -0.000 0.000 - -

- -

Delta Net Income (2009-2013) - - 0.000 0.000 - - - -

Interactive terms

Attitude toward EU X Government

Range D2

- - - - -0.232*** 0.089 - -

Left & Not Located X Government

Range D2

- - - -

- - 0.410*** 0.089

Constant -5.383 4.612 -1.638 1.292 -5.643 4.606 -5.355 4.569

Number of observations 11.397 11.140 11.397 11.397

Log likelihood = -3.523.320 -3.522.020 -3.519.850 -3.512.530

19

Fig.5 Conditional Marginal Effects using Model LEFTNOTL 0

.05

.1.1

5.2

Effects

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 1leftnotlocated

Average Marginal Effects of govrange2008D2_sum with 90% CIs

-.0

5

0

.05

.1.1

5

Effects

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 .5 1 1.5 2 2.5govrange2008D2_sum

Average Marginal Effects of 1.leftnotlocated with 90% CIs

Fig.6 Conditional Marginal Effects using Model EUR

0

.05

.1.1

5.2

Effects

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 1nationeumembership1

Average Marginal Effects of govrange2008D2_sum with 90% CIs

0

.05

.1.1

5.2

.25

Effects

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 .5 1 1.5 2 2.5govrange2008D2_sum

Average Marginal Effects of 1.nationeumembership1 with 90% CIs

3) Non-voting at the 2014 EP elections: “silent” euroskepticism or estrangement from politics?

In view of the evidences showed above, one might well ask whether abstention at the last EP elections

has been driven by - more or less - the same causal mechanisms underlying euroskeptic voting. In truth,

previous contributions already argued about a possible overlap in the motivations of these two

behaviors (e.g. Hobolt et. al. 2009). However, at the last 2014 EP elections things could have been

different. These were, in fact, the EU-wide political competition in which more voters than ever cast

their votes for political parties that advocated radical reforms of the EU or campaigned for an exit of

their countries from the EU political system in opposition to their mainstream competitors (Treib

20

2014).9 Within such context, a higher salience of EU related issues (e.g. Trechsel, De Sio and Garzia

2014) could have indeed mobilized most of inherently euroskeptic voters to cast their vote, thus

draining abstention of any political relevance. For this reason we hypothesize euroskeptic voters and

abstainers at the last EP elections to hold at least partially different motivational profiles. In order to

test this last hypothesis we estimated some further statistical models. The first one is aimed at

estimating the net effects of all the variables we have considered so far, while each of the other models

also tests one of the three cross-level interactions already included in the study of euroskeptic vote

choice. The main difference compared to the previous analysis stays in the dependent variable, which is

now aimed at contrasting those who did not vote to all citizens who expressed their preference for a

mainstream party in the EES survey context. As already mentioned, the choice of excluding those who

voted for an EUSK party is due to the nature of the object we want to focus on: not the causes of non-

voting at the last EP elections, but rather the causal mechanisms, i.e. the decision-making logic,

underlying the choice between, on the one side, mainstream parties and, on the other, abstention as an

alternative to euroskeptic party choice. What clearly emerges is the significant effect of some variables

which have not been found as relevant to euroskeptic behavior. I refer in particular to cognitive factors

as level of political information, education and political interest, which exert a negative impact on the

probability of preferring non-voting to support for mainstream parties.

Tab 3: Individual and Contextual effects on “non-voting” at the European elections of 2014 ALLNET INTERpartial INTERfull1 INTERFULL2

Coef se coef se coef se coef Se

Individual variables

Decrease in income (Yes=1) 0.013 0.034 0.017 0.032 0.014 0.035 0.013 0.035

Social status (0=low; 10=high) -0.097*** 0.012 -0.092*** 0.019 -0.097*** 0.012 -0.097*** 0.012

Retrospective economic

evaluation

(1= Lot worse; 5= Lot better)

-0.041* 0.022 -0.072*** 0.020 -0.039* 0.022 -0.042* 0.022

Prospective economic evaluation

(1= Lot worse; 5= Lot better)

-0.058** 0.021 -0.111*** 0.021 -0.058** 0.023 -0.059** 0.023

Occupational status ( Manual

worker, unemployed and

housekeeper =1)

0.157*** 0.037 0.179*** 0.034 0.158*** 0366 0.157*** 0.037

Political Information (at least

once a week = 1)

-0.387*** 0.038 -0.427*** 0.036 -0.385*** 0.038 -0.385*** 0.038

9

For a conceptual and analytic definition of mainstream parties, see Meguid (2005; 2008)

21

Education (prosecuted after age

of 15 = 1) -0.201*** 0.047 -0.227*** 0.044 -0.204*** 0.048 -0.200*** 0.048

Political Interest

(at least moderately interested =

1)

0.945***

0.033

1.084***

0.031

0.944***

0.034

0.944***

0.034

Left & Not Located (Yes = 1) 0.018 0.036 - - 0.020 0.036 -0.077 0.063

Attitude toward EU (negative = 1) 0.651*** 0.034 - - 0.521*** 0.060 0.651*** 0.034

Gender (female = 1) -0.160*** 0.032 -0.111*** 0.031 -0.160*** 0.033 -0.161*** 0.033

Age -0.022*** 0.001 -0.022*** 0.000 -0.022*** 0.001 -0.022*** 0.001

2.Place of residence

(Small or middle sized town=1)

0.013 0.038 0.042 0.236 0.012 0.038 0.013 0.038

3.Place of residence (Large

town=1) 0.025 0.043 0.025 0.519 0.027 0.042 0.027 0.043

Contextual variables

Post-communist country (Yes=1) 1.831*** 0.048 1.750*** 0.487 1.830*** 0.478 1.828*** 0.480

Government Range D2 -0.070 0.193 0.113 0.209 -0.126 0.193 -0.096 0.193

Delta Net Income (2009-2013) -0.000*** .0.000 -0.001*** .0.000 -0.001*** 0.000 0.000*** 0.000

Net Income 2013 0.000*** 0.000 0.000*** 0.000 0.000*** 0.000 0.000*** 0.000

Interactive terms

Social status X Government

Range D2 - - -0.024* 0.013 - - - -

Attitude toward EU X

Government Range D2 - - - 0.112*** 0.042 - -

Dummy for ideology X

Government Range D2 - - - - - 0.087* 0.047

Constant -0.613 0.555 -0.029 0.568 -0.553* 0.554 -0.579 0.557

Number of observations 21857 24448 21857 21857

Log Likelihood -11775.313 -13387.536 -11771.82 -11773.594

Sources: EES Voter Study (2014), EUandI dataset (2014) and EUROSTAT data (2008-2013)

Note: Table entries are not standardized coefficients and standard errors from multilevel logistic regression models. Significant at

***p<0.01, **p<0.05, *p<0.1.

Of course, such tendency is accompanied also by further characteristics. For example, non-voting is

also linked to economic perceptions, and in particular to sociotropic prospective considerations, whose

unitary increase lowers on average the probability of abstention of about 6%. On the contrary, egoistic

considerations, such as having experienced a decrease in income during the last two years, appear as

not significant. In line then with the previous literature on this topic, both being female and older

people decreases the probability to abstain of respectively 15% and 3%. Also living in a post-

communist environment strongly favors non-voting, as we expected. Moreover, holding an agnostic or

negative attitude towards the EU membership of one’s own country increases the probability of

abstaining of about 92%. Especially considering this latter figure, one might well say that the causal

paths driving respectively to euroskeptic vote choice and to abstention are in all the same. And yet,

22

government political heterogeneity alone does not exert any significant effect in the second case. This

could be in truth the sign of an intrinsic diversity of non-voting at the last EP elections. However, a

similar conclusion cannot disregard the cross-level interactions we assessed in the other models. In fact

the coefficient of interactions terms are weaker than in the models we proposed to explain the vote for

EUSK parties. An investigation of the marginal effects on the dependent variable reveals pretty mixed

results.10

On one side, differently from the previous analysis, in no model an increase of the

government heterogeneity affects significantly the probability to abstain, whatever the perception of

social status, the attitude toward EU and the self placement on left-right continuum (Fig. 7, 8, 9, left

panels). On the other side an improvement in the perception of personal social status and the shift from

a positive to a negative or agnostic attitude towards EU integration have an increasing impact on the

probability of abstaining as the level of government political heterogeneity grows up (see Figure 9 and

10 , right panels).

Fig.7 Conditional Marginal Effects using Model INTERpartial

Fig.8 Conditional Marginal Effects using Model INTERfull1

10 For a guidance to the statistical interpretation of conditional hypotheses, see Brambor, Clark and Golder (2006)

-.1

-.05

0

.05

.1

Effe

cts

on P

redi

cted

Mea

n, F

ixed

Por

tion

Onl

y

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10Lowest/highest social status (perception)

Average Marginal Effects of Government range D2 with 90% CIs

-.1-.0

5

0

.05

Effe

cts

on P

redi

cted

Mea

n, F

ixed

Por

tion

Onl

y

0 1Anti EU attitude

Average Marginal Effects of Government range D2 with 90% CIs

23

The difference between the lower and the higher conditional marginal effect in the two cases, namely

perception of social status and attitude towards EU is respectively 0,01 and 0,05. Although not large,

their magnitudes are stably significant. In addition, the shape assumed by such effects substantially

overlap those we obtained in the corresponding analysis of euroskeptic vote choice. Are all these

elements sufficient to argue that euroskeptic voters and abstainers rely on the same anti-EU background

at the last EP elections? A further analysis of Left-right orientations can help to answer this question.

Indeed, while having a leftist (or none) self-placement has been found to increase the probability of an

euroskeptic vote choice, in case of abstention we do not find any significant effect of that variable, both

as an individual predictor and as an interaction term (see Model INTERFULL2). A summary

concerning the analysis of the related conditional marginal effects at varying conditions of government

ideological heterogeneity can be found in Fig.9 left panel

Fig.9 Conditional Marginal Effects using INTERFULL2

-.1

-.0

5

0

.05

Effects

on P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 1lef or not located

Average Marginal Effects of Government range D2 with 90% CIs

-.0

4-.

02

0

.02

.04

.06

Effect

s o

n P

red

icte

d M

ea

n, F

ixe

d P

ort

ion O

nly

0 .5 1 1.5 2 2.5

Government ideological heterogeneity

Average Marginal Effects of being leftist or not located with 95% CIs

In sum what in fact clearly emerges from the data is that abstention appears only very partly

characterized by similar motives to those preceding an euroskeptic vote choice. We mention, among

these, negative sociotropic perceptions, perceiving themselves at the bottom of the social ladder and a

certain amount of euroskepticism, presumably stemming from “agnosticism” towards (or perceived

distance of) EU institutions, rather than from a fully structured anti-EU attitude. Nevertheless, two

fundamental aspects make abstainers (at least during last EP elections) clearly distinguishable from

euroskeptic voters. The first is their massive cognitive disengagement, properly signaled by the fact

that non-voting is significantly associated with low levels of education, information and political

interest. The second is that, as just mentioned, the way they solve the dichotomy between "vote for

24

mainstream parties" and "abstention" does not imply any significant role for the traditional ideological

left-right continuum11

. Therefore our initial hypothesis seems to be confirmed. Despite their common

euroskeptic mould, voting for EUSK parties and abstaining are not supported by identical combinations

of causal factors.

Conclusions

The role of the political institutions in affecting the voting choice of mass electorate has been noticed

for quite long time. However even the most recent studies usually miss to take in consideration how the

modern (spatial) theories describe the decision making inside the modern democracies. Such a missing

link precludes the scholars to consider the prediction of these theories as useful element also for an

explanation of the voter behavior of citizens. In this paper we hope to have been able to start filling this

gap. We hypothesized that in European parliamentary democracies an high “spatial” heterogeneity of

the government makes more likely distasteful outcomes for some voters who are not necessarily

extremist but who can prefer “extremist” platforms if stalemate and policy stability or insufficient

compromise prevail. Also when we imagine a voter’s radicalization we have good reasons to think that

the translation of this change of political preferences in a change of voting behavior is not always the

same in all countries but can depend on the constellation of country actors (the government parties)

who are crucial in the decision making processes. If this constellation is conflictual enough to prevent

any change then voter will translate slight radicalization of political preferences in an high

radicalization of the electoral choice.. An European survey conducted after EP elections allowed us to

test these hypotheses with reference to the vote for EUSK parties. The large variety of individual and

contextual variables the survey contains makes quite convincing the confirmation of our hypotheses.

An additional investigation about the abstentionism permits also to exclude a full overlapping between

euroskeptic voter and abstentionist even if some similarities suggest that maybe in some circumstances

one (but whom?) is the descendant of the other.

11

If we substitute the dummy variable left & not located with the variable “not located”, that set citizens who refuse to place

themselves on left-right continuum against all other citizens, the coefficient is positive, very high and significant always but

the model with interaction term. Analyses are available on request.

25

Appendix

LIST OF THE EUROSKEPTIC PARTIES

Country Party Label Party Name (original) Party Name (English)

AUSTRIA FPÖ Freiheitliche Partei

Österreichs

The Freedom Party of Austria

BZÖ Bündnis Zukunft Österreich Alliance for the Future of Austria

EU STOP EU-Austritt, Direkte

Demokratie, Neutralität,

EU – Exit party

REKOS Die Reformkonservativen The Reform Conservatives

BELGIUM VB Vlaams Belang Flemish Interest

BULGARIA NOA Nacionalno Obedinenie

Ataka

National Union Attack

NFSB Natzionalen Front za

Spasenie na Bulgaria

National Front for Salvation of

Bulgaria

CYPRUS AKEL Anorthotikó Kómma

Ergazómenou Laoú

Progressive Party for the Working

People

ELAM Ethniko Laiko Metopo National Popular Front

CZECH REPUBLIC KSCM Komunistická strana Cech a

Moravy

Communist Party of Bohemia and

Moravia 10.98

Svobodni Strana svobodných občanů Party of Free Citizens

DS Dělnická strana sociální

spravedlnosti

Workers' Party of Social Justice

SZR Strana Zdravého Rozumu Party of Common Sense

GERMANY NPD Nationaldemokratische Partei

Deutschlands

National Democratic Party

AfD Alternative für Deutschland Alternative for Germany

26

DENMARK DF Dansk Folkeparti Danish People’s Party

FolkB Folkebevægelsen mod EU People’s Movement Against EU

ESTONIA EIP Eesti Iseseisvuspartei Estonian Independence Party

EKRE Eesti Konservatiivne

Rahvaerakond

Conservative’s People Party

FINLAND PS Persussuomalaiset True Finns

FRANCE LO Liste ouvrière Workers’ struggle

FN Front National National Front

DLR Debout la République Arise the Republic

UK IndEU An independence from

Europe

An independence from Europe

UKIP UK Independence Party UK Independence Party

BNP British National Party British National Party

SF Sinn Fèin We Ourselves

DUP Democratic Unionist Party Democratic Unionist Party

UUP Ulster Unionist Party Ulster Unionist Party

TUV Traditional Unionist Voice Traditionalist Unionist Voice

GREECE AE Anexartitoi Ellines Independent Greeks

EPAM Eniaìo Pallaikò Mètopo United Popular Front

KKE Kommounistikó Kómma

Elládas

Communist Party of Greece

LAOS Laikós Orthódoxos

Synagermós

Popular Orthodox Rally

CA Chrysí Avgí Golden Dawn

HUNGARY JOBBIK Jobbik Magyarországért

Mozgalom

Movement for a Better Hungary

27

IRELAND SF Sinn Fèin We Ourselves

ITALY LN Lega Nord North League

M5S Movimento 5 Stelle Five Star Movement

Fd’I Fratelli d’Italia Brothers of Italy

LATVIA ZSS Zaļo un Zemnieku savienība Union of Greens and Farmers

LSP Latvijas Sociālistiskā partija Socialist Party of Latvia

LUXEMBOURG PID Partei fir Integral Demokratie Party of Full Democracy

L Dei Lènk The Left

KPL Kommunistesch Partei

Lëtzebuerg

Communist Party of Luxembourg

NETHERLAND

SP Socialistische Partij Socialist Party

PVV Partij voor de Vrijheid Party for Freedom

SGP Staatkundig Gereformeerde

Partij

Reformed Political Party

PvdD Partij voor de Dieren Party for the Animals

A50 Artikel 50 Article 50

POLAND KNP Kongres Nowej Prawicy Congress of the New Right

SP Solidarna Polska United Poland

RN Ruch Narodowy National Democracy

PORTUGAL CDU Coligação Democrática

Unitária

Unitarian Democratic Coalition

PCTP/

MRPP

Partido Comunisto dos

Trabalhadores Portugueses

Workers’ Communist Party

PRN Partido Nacional Renovador National Renovator Party

ROMANIA PRM Partidul România Mare Greater Romania Party

SWEDEN V Vänsterpartiet Left Party

28

MP Miljöpartiet de Gröna Environmental Party - the Greens

SD Sverigedemokraterna Sweden Democrats

SLOVAKIA SNS Slovenská národná strana Slovak National Party

SL’S Slovenská ľudová strana Slovak People’s Party

29

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