Fleeing the centre: the rise of challenger parties in the aftermath of the euro crisis
By S. Hobolt, James Tilley. Europe’s Union in Crisis, 2016
396 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The eurozone crisis has altered the party political landscape across Europe. The most visible effect is the rise of challenger parties. The crisis not only caused economic hardship, but also placed considerable fiscal constraints upon a number of national governments. Many voters have reacted to this by turning their back on the traditional parties and opting instead for new, or reinvigorated, challenger parties that reject the mainstream consensus of austerity and European integration. This article argues that both sanctioning and selection mechanisms can help to explain this flight from the centre to challenger parties. First, voters who were economically adversely affected by the crisis punish mainstream parties both in government and in opposition by voting for challenger parties. Second, the choice of specific challenger party is shaped by preferences on three issues that directly flow from the euro crisis: EU integration, austerity and immigration. Analysing both aggregate-level and individual-level survey data from all 17 Western EU member states, this article finds strong support for both propositions and shows how the crisis has reshaped the nature of party competition in Europe.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6671018e45b8f6be7c614696f510cb2c9a20479d
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In Political Science and International Relations
Citations in the corpus
- Cleavage theory meets Europe’s crises: Lipset, Rokkan, and the transnational cleavage (2018, background): “In much of Europe the crises have reinforced a new transnational cleavage that has at its core a cultural conflict pitting libertarian, universalistic values against the defense of nationalism and particularism (Bornschier and Kriesi 2012; Golder 2016: 488; Höglinger 2016).”
- The Brexit vote: a divided nation, a divided continent (2016, background): “In national elections populist right-wing parties opposed to the EU, such as Geert Wilders’s farright Freedom Party, the Danish People’s Party, the Finns Party and the Sweden Democrats, have gained electoral support in the recent decade (Hobolt and Tilley 2016).”