EURONORMATIVITY A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Party Profiles and Electoral Performance in the European Context

Abstract

The observation that many mainstream parties in European domestic party systems have lost votes over the past two decades is nothing new. Pro-European parties’ continued resistance against a policy shift on the European dimension of domestic party competition arguably provides a better explanation for their decay than existing frameworks which identify policy shifts of specific party families as detrimental to electoral performance in the long term. Data from the 1999-2019 Chapel Hill Expert Survey trend file is used to perform a multi-value Qualitative Comparative Analysis on a sample of 120 European domestic parties observed during the time periods 1999-2009 and 2010-2019. Thereby, the conjunctural effects of holistic party profiles, that is, parties’ EU position, EU issue attention, EU internal dissent, economic left- right position, and GAL-TAN position, on the average change in parties’ share of votes are tested. As expected, the combination of pro-European position and low EU issue attention has substantial explanatory power. Although it is neither by itself sufficient for electoral failure nor is its absence necessary for electoral success, it crucially complements the existing explanatory frameworks. While the theory is only valid in the Western European context, it makes a strong and empirically substantiated case for focusing more on the European dimension in the future, both on the part of research and parties.