Salience of European Union Issues in Party Manifestos for General Elections: A Comparative Mapping

by Cristina Ares, Associate Professor of Political Science, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Introduction

This blog post presents a comprehensive picture of EU salience in the programmatic offerings of national parties after the Maastricht Treaty went into effect in 1993, marking the emergence of the EU as a fully-fledged political system. The present analysis includes 175 general elections that took place in 28 member states between 1994 and the beginning of the 2019-2024 EU institutional cycle.

This is a relevant issue for EU politics, as general elections affect the composition of the Council of the EU and the European Council. Consequently, the positions on the EU policy portfolio official taken by national parties prior to general elections are crucial to link citizen´s preferences to EU decisions.

The objective of the post is two-fold: first, to observe an eventual variation with regard to salience of EU affairs on the macro level of the party systems; and second, to identify the parties that place a higher emphasis on EU issues.

We expect election pledges on EU themes to be scarce, without major differences across countries or between party families, including political parties that oppose the European integration process and/or other EU public policies.

Findings

On the macro level, EU salience, as the percentage of ideas on EU affairs out of the total number of ideas contained in the platforms, has been consistently low. The EU mean is 2.71%. No country mean exceeds 5%. The two highest ones are France (5%) and the United Kingdom (4.38%).

Moreover, on the meso level, it has not been common practice to include EU themes in the manifestos across the whole spectrum of party families. See mean scores in figure 1. 

Figure 1. Emphasis on EU issues: mean and upper scores within party families.

Besides, we separate out the thirty-one cases that have devoted 10% or more of their platforms to EU issues. These cases represent 2.4% out of the 1,292 cases examined.

Table 1. Families of the parties that have placed greater emphasis on EU themes. 

PARTY FAMILY	FREQUENCY	PERCENT
Nationalist parties	9	29.03
Socialist or other left parties	5	16.13
Liberal parties	5	16.13
Social democratic parties	3	9.68
Ecological parties	2	6.45
Conservative parties	2	6.45
Special issue parties	2	6.45
Christian democratic parties	1	3.23
Agrarian parties	1	3.23
Ethnic and regional parties	1	3.23

Denmark (with four parties), Greece (four parties) and Britain (three parties) are the member states with more parties within the set of cases that give more visibility to EU issues in their manifestos.

Conclusion

Emphasis on EU issues in party manifestos for general elections has remained low from 1994 to 2018 across member states. Furthermore, there is no direct association between salience of EU affairs and neither party family nor criticism about these themes. Eurosceptic parties have not enhanced party offerings about EU issues on the macro level of the party systems either.

[1] Our source of data is the Manifesto Research on Political Representation (MARPOR). We use variable 108, which contains favorable mentions of the EU, and category 110 that gathers the negative references to EU affairs.

Posted in: EU,European Union,general elections