Voting for a social Europe? European solidarity and voting behaviour in the 2019 European elections
| Date | 01 March 2022 |
| Published date | 01 March 2022 |
| Author | Francesco Visconti,Alessandro Pellegata |
| DOI | 10.1177/14651165211035054 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Voting for a social Europe?
European solidarity and
voting behaviour in the
2019 European elections
Alessandro Pellegata
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan,
Italy
Francesco Visconti
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan,
Italy
Abstract
This article investigates whether public preferences for European solidarity are asso-
ciated with vote choices in the 2019 European elections. After multiple crises, the poli-
ticisation of European Union affairs has increased, polarising voters and parties between
those favouring the redistribution of risks across member states and those prioritising
national responsibility in coping with the consequences of the crises. We expect pro-
solidarity voters to be more prone to vote for green and radical-left parties and less
prone to vote for conservative and radical-right parties. Testing these hypotheses in
10 European Union countries with original survey data, we find that green and radi-
cal-left parties profited from European solidarity voting only in some countries, while
being pro-solidarity reduced the likelihood of voting for both moderate and radical-
right parties in each sample country.
Keywords
European elections, European solidarity, public opinion, social Europe, voting behaviour
Corresponding author:
Alessandro Pellegata, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Milan, Via Conservatorio 7,
Milan 20122, Italy
Email: alessandro.pellegata@unimi.it
Article
European Union Politics
2022, Vol. 23(1) 79–99
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/14651165211035054
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Introduction
European elections were held in May 2019 following an unprecedented number of
complex and interrelated crises that the European Union (EU) experienced after 2008:
the Great Recession, the European sovereign debt crisis, the refugee crisis and Brexit.
A vast amount of literature shows that the politicisation of the EU increased during
this testing period (Hutter and Kriesi, 2019; Van der Brug et al., 2022). European
public opinions polarise not only along the integration–demarcation divide but also con-
cerning whether the EU should or should not implement policies to share the burden of
the crises across EU member states and citizens (Gerhards et al., 2020).
The growing saliency of the social dimension of the EU has also been observed in the
manifestos of all European political groups, in which the number of policy proposals
strengthening European solidarity increased in the 2019 election campaign compared
with 2014. Furthermore, parties were polarised between those standing for a form of eco-
nomic integration that prioritises fiscal stability, without any interference from the EU in
national social security systems, and those advocating for a ‘social Europe’, the priorities
of which should be to correct the imbalances of the market and ensure a high level of
social protection for European citizens (Pagano and Regazzoni, 2019). This conflict
reflects the longstanding debate on the type of European integration desired, distinguish-
ing analytically between ‘negative’and ‘positive’integration (Scharpf, 1999, 2010), and
the question of whether the EU should be more than just a regulatory state (Majone,
1996). Against this background, this study aims to investigate whether voters’prefer-
ences for European solidarity –a concept that refers to the individual willingness to
share (economic) risks across the EU (Ciornei and Recchi, 2017: 470) –affected their
voting behaviour in the 2019 European elections.
According to the second-order theory, voters usually interpreted European elections as
less relevant than national contestations and mainly used them to signal their dissatisfac-
tion with the government parties by voting for challengers (Hix and Marsh, 2011; Marsh,
1998; Reif and Schmitt, 1980). Nevertheless, more recent studies provide evidence that,
in European as well as in national elections, parties also compete over EU-related issues
and voters may cast their vote based on proposals concerning the future of the EU (Hix
and Marsh, 2007; Hobolt et al., 2009; Hobolt and Wittrock, 2011; Van Spanje and De
Vreese, 2011). In particular, Hobolt (2015) and Hobolt and De Vries (2016) demonstrate
that citizens’preferences for intra-EU financial redistribution and their evaluation of the
EU’s performance in coping with the Eurozone crisis were associated with voting for
Eurosceptic parties located on both the far left and the far right in the 2014 European
elections.
Grounded in the EU issue voting literature, this article provides two main contribu-
tions. First, we unpack support for the EU by investigating the preferences for a specific
type of Europe, namely ‘social Europe’, which implies a proactive policy-making role in
the social dimension (Ferrera, 2017; Vandenbroucke et al., 2017). Differently from
Hobolt (2015) and Hobolt and De Vries (2016), we refer to multiple crises and consider
forms of solidarity that imply not only financial help for other countries but also EU-level
social policies, the freedom of movement of European citizens and a common policy on
80 European Union Politics 23(1)
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