Continuity and Change of Party Democracies in Europe by Sebastian Bukow & Uwe Jun

Author:Sebastian Bukow & Uwe Jun
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783658289881
Publisher: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden

Methodology

To assess the levels to which the different political parties are vulnerable to anti-immigrant populist competition, we use the European Election Study (EES) from 2014. The 2014 EES dataset was collected immediately after the European Parliamentary election that year, using random samples of voters in each of the EU member states. The study is extensively documented on the European Elections Studies (EES) website (http://​www.​europeanelection​studies.​net). Due to the level of coordination in both questionnaire and sample methodologies, EES datasets are highly suitable for comparative research, as has been demonstrated in various studies (e.g. Van der Brug et al. 2005b; Van der Eijk and Franklin 1996). In this study we analyse ten different countries that have a significant anti-immigrant populist party: the UK, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy and Greece.

We use vote propensity scores to assess the electoral vulnerability of parties. The propensity-to-vote (PTV) measure was developed to better gauge party preferences in multi-party systems (van der Eijk 2002; van der Eijk et al. 2006; van der Eijk and Marsh 2007). The PTV provides more than just the final party choice; it also helps reveal the ‘political DNA’ of voters by tapping into the extent to which a citizen could vote for each of the parties competing in an election. Voters are asked how likely it is that they will “ever vote” for each of the parties, where 0 stands for “not likely at all”, and 10 stands for “very likely”.

We assess the electoral vulnerability of parties through regression analysis using the propensity to vote for populist parties as the dependent variable. The analysis takes the form of a stacked model, which includes three models that aim to predict the propensity to vote for a populist party in a given country. Taking this vote propensity for a populist party, we first regress this PTV against the structural variables (age, gender and educational attainment), to control for the effect of the predictor variables in the models that follow. The second model uses as independent variables the voting propensities of respondents for all other parties in the national party system (included in the EES dataset). This tells us how much an increase in one point in the PTV of a non-populist party affects the PTV of the populist party. The third model includes variables measuring the political orientation of respondents in terms of left and right self-placement and their level of scepticism towards European integration, which are introduced into the model as two separate predictor variables.

The variables used in the regression analysis were taken from the 2014 EES survey, which collects information regarding age, gender and educational attainment (the number of years for each respondent to complete formal education). The EES data also provides the vote propensities of each respondent for all the major political parties in their national party system. The political orientation variable was obtained through a question in the survey in which respondents were asked to position themselves on a scale from 0 to 10, in which 0 is “left” and 10 is “right”.

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