Beyond Kriesiland: EU integration as a super issue after the Eurocrisis

Abstract

Where some researchers have seen only a limited impact of Europeanisation on national party politics, others have added a separate European Union dimension to the pre-existing economic left-right dimension to model the national political space. This article examines the effects of the European crisis on the national political space across the EU utilising data from the 2014 European Election Survey. It analyses the effect of a country's economic development on the coherence between attitudes towards the EU and economic issues using multilevel regression. Strong evidence is found that in the Southern European debtor states economic and European issues are merging as a result of strong European interference in their economic policy. In the Northern European creditor states a second relevant dimension focuses on cultural issues. These results offer the next step in theorising Europeanisation.