The institutional and political roots of the electoral rise of the Euroskeptic parties

The last European elections were characterized by a growth in many countries of the percentage of votes in favor of Euroskeptic parties. However this growth has not been uniform. While for example the Euroskeptic parties have obtained 30.9% of votes in Italy and 34.4% in the Netherlands, in Germany they have not exceeded 8% and they were essentially absent in Spain (De Sio et al. 2014). The macroeconomic conditions have probably played a key role in increasing the dissatisfaction of a part of the European electorate towards pro-European Union national governments (Kriesi and Fernandez 2013; Pirro and Kessel 2013). Nevertheless the growth of euroskepticism concerned countries with very different macroeconomic performance (e.g. UK and Greece) and it was very modest or absent in countries with high levels of unemployment and low economic growth (e.g. Spain). In sum on one side the great variance among European countries suggest the importance of the national contexts in explaining the success of EUSK parties; on the other side national economic conditions do not seem to be a very promising explanatory factor. In this paper we investigate about the role played by a country specific factor different from the economic performance, the heterogeneity of government coalitions in the policy space (Tsebelis 2002). We argue that in countries characterized by heterogeneous governments in the last years before EP elections, above all along the pro-anti EU dimension, citizens were more likely to vote for Euroskeptic parties. We hypothesize also that the interaction between some individual features and the heterogeneity of the government play an important role in the explanation. We take advantage of the 2014 EES Voter Study and of EuanDI data set to test our hypotheses that are largely confirmed by several statistical models. An attempt to apply the same models to the abstention shows that at least during the last EP elections motivations for euroskeptical vote and abstention are quite different.