European Integration Cleavage in the 8th and 9th European Parliament

As a result of the financial crisis of ‘08- ‘09 and the Euro crisis of ’13-’15, Euroscepticism has become more mainstream and gotten a more prominent place in political debates and elections. This development was particularly visible at the European Parliament (EP) elections of 2014, where anti-European parties significantly increased their share of parliamentary seats. According to Hix, Noury and Roland, this shift has caused a surge in the importance of the pro/anti-European integration division compared to the traditional left-right division, measured in voting behaviour. The 2019 EP elections were not preceded by a similar crisis, but still resulted in an increased share of seats for anti-European Members of the European Parliament (MEPs). Therefore, this thesis will focus on the composition of political cleavages in the complete eighth and the newly elected ninth term of the EP. The term political cleavage was first introduced by Lipset and Rokkan to describe divisions in society which were mirrored in politics. These divisions were usually competing world views which encompassed a varying range of issues, i.e. liberal market views opposed to government intervention. Traditionally, the left-right cleavage has been the most important, while in the 70’s and 90’s cultural values of universal values opposed to local, cultural values gained in importance. Some authors argue that the cleavage of European integration falls along the same division as the cultural cleavage, while others treat it as a new emerging cleavage, quickly gaining in importance. To analyse the development of the different cleavages, a multidimensional scaling analysis of roll-call data between 2014 and 2019 was done. Roll-call data are the publicly recorded votes of individual MEPs. Using these votes and multidimensional scaling, the ideological distances between MEPs were calculated and plotted in a 2-dimensional graph. To interpret the coordinates of the MEPs in this graph an OLS regression was performed. The results from this regression showed that in the period from 2014 until the first half of 2019, the eighth term of the EP, a combination of the measurement for European integration and GAL/TAN was the best predictor for the first dimension, while the general left-right and economic left-right measures were most important on the second dimension. During the ninth term, the cleavages shifted and neither cleavage is clearly dominant , although EU integration seems to have a slight upper hand. It can be concluded that since the 2014 election, the EU integration cleavage has lost in dominance, but also that this cleavage has submerged with the cultural cleavage.