Varieties of pro-Europeanism? How mainstream parties compete over redistribution in the European Union

Abstract

Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade has put generally pro-European mainstream parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self-reliance. Both notions are integrationist, but they come with distinct policy implications. What determines mainstream party support for either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on data provided by the ‘EUandI’ voting advice application, which contains party positions on core issues of integration for all EU member states for the four European Parliament elections between 2009 and 2024. Mainstream party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological placement on the economic and cultural dimension. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU-level redistribution, conservative and right parties are wedded to the idea of a regulatory European polity. This general dynamic, however, interacts with parties’ domestic considerations, that is, the public salience of an issue and a country's net-payer status in the EU. We further find that the effect of mainstream parties’ ideological positioning differs across policy domains. While cultural and economic positions drive support for redistribution in fiscal and taxation policy to a nearly equal extent, support for redistribution in migration policy is driven by cultural factors alone, while in matters of security and defence right mainstream parties are more supportive of European solidarity than parties of the mainstream left. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties now compete visibly over EU-level redistribution, but that their stances on transnational solidarity differ depending on the domestic situation and the policy domain in question.