Euroscepticism and anti-establishment parties in Europe

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between party-based Euroscepticism and parties taking anti-establishment positions in contemporary Europe to map the relationship between these positions. The paper reports on an expert-informed qualitative comparative classification (EiQCC) of parties in 30 European countries conducted 2018–2019 to present a classification of 77 parties as Eurosceptic and anti-establishment. With this, we show that there were a number of different clusters of parties with various relationships between anti-establishment and Eurosceptic positions. The largest cluster showed a strong association between anti-establishment discourses and Euroscepticism. But there were also significant clusters where there was little or no interaction and were either anti-establishment and not Eurosceptic, or Eurosceptic without being anti-establishment. We also identify clusters where there was a weak association between anti-establishment and Eurosceptic positions and where anti-establishment parties had Eurosceptic stances but their position on European integration was either very weakly articulated or of very low salience.