Why vote when you cannot choose? EU intervention and political participation in times of constraint
| Author | Stuart J Turnbull-Dugarte |
| DOI | 10.1177/1465116520910476 |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Why vote when you
cannot choose? EU
intervention and political
participation in times
of constraint
Stuart J Turnbull-Dugarte
Department of Politics and International Relations,
University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Abstract
This article analyses how economic intervention affects individuals’ political behaviour
by assessing the impact of intervention on aggregate and individual turnout. The inter-
vention of the European Union in a selection of member states is viewed as having
negative consequences for democratic choice, reducing the ability of voters to select
between distinct policy alternatives, resulting in the absence of the primary benefit of
voting: choice. It is argued that when voters are faced with electoral choices without
the ability to shape policy alternatives, they are less likely to vote. Moreover, the
negative effect of intervention is found to be conditioned by both individua ls’ level of
education and ideological identification. Voters on the centre and the left who feel
abandoned by left-leaning parties, who have prioritised being responsible to their
European paymasters, are significantly more likely to abstain when exposed to inter-
vention. Empirical support for the argument is found via the analysis of aggregate
turnout as well as individual level data from the European Social Survey from across
fifteen Western European states.
Keywords
Election turnout, Eurozone crisis, political participation, Troika, voting
Corresponding author:
Stuart J Turnbull-Dugarte, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Southampton,
Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK.
Email: s.turnbull-dugarte@soton.ac.uk
European Union Politics
2020, Vol. 21(3) 406–428
!The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1465116520910476
journals.sagepub.com/home/eup
Introduction
If ‘only voting that facilitates popular choice is democratic’ (Riker, 1982: 5), how
do individuals react when they are allowed to vote but they are presented with very
limited choice? The economic intervention of the European Union (EU) has been
found to exhibit a constraining effect on democratic regimes by reducing their
room to manoeuvre responsiveness of state governments to citizens’ preferences
(Alonso, 2014; Ruiz-Rufino and Alonso, 2017). This has resulted in ‘democracy
without choice’ (Alonso, 2014) within the intervened-in member states, whereby
voters continue to vote but are robbed of choice. Recent work has studied
the effect of the economic intervention on electoral outcomes (Alonso and Ruiz-
Rufino, 2020), political protests (Genovese et al., 2016), party politics (Turnbull-
Dugarte, 2020), satisfaction with democracy (Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014;
Devine, 2019; Ruiz-Rufino and Alonso, 2017; Schraff and Schimmelfennig, 2019),
political trust (Foster and Frieden, 2017), as well as the democratic legitimacy of
member states and EU institutions (Alonso, 2014; Laffan, 2014; Sa
´nchez-Cuenca,
2017). We know very little, however, regarding how EU intervention affects voter
turnout. Steiner (2010, 2016) argues that economic integration limits the scope for
choice, depressing turnout as a result. H€
ausermann et al. (2018) show the same in
the case of hard economic times. This article asks: does the economic intervention
of the EU impact individual political participation in national elections?
In the following, I present a simple difference-in-difference model of aggregate
turnout data and the analysis of individual-level data from the European Social
Survey (ESS) to demonstrate that EU intervention negatively influences political
participation. The results suggest that the premium of the EU’s intervention in
maintaining the financial stability of fiscally handicapped member states has come
at the cost of a reduction in the propensity of individuals to turn out to vote on
election day. The suppressive nature of intervention on turnout is conditioned,
however, by both political sophistication, much in the same way as economic
hardship (H€
ausermann et al., 2018) and also by voters’ ideological placement on
the left–right dimension. The main empirical and theoretical contribution is to
demonstrate that intervention may only affect individual political participation
amongst centrist and left-leaning voters. The perception of an imposing externality
tying the hands of their government is less likely to be present for right-leaning
individuals, given that the conditionality requirements mirror the policy preferen-
ces that tend to be advocated for by right-leaning political parties. Voters on the
left, on the other hand, are more likely to view the democratic utility of their vote
as being undermined because social democratic and left-wing parties are conceding
to supranational demands and adopting structural reforms and internal devalua-
tion measures that their core electoral constituencies are opposed to.
This study adds to existing work that assesses how EU intervention negatively
impacted voter attitudes towards the EU and satisfaction with democracy
(Armingeon and Guthmann, 2014; Devine, 2019; Ruiz-Rufino and Alonso,
2017; Schraff and Schimmelfennig, 2019), and how intervention shaped aggregate
Turnbull-Dugarte 407
To continue reading
Request your trial