Do rules matter? Party regulation and anti-European political movements

Abstract

Protest and anti-European parties have recently become very popular in many member States of the EU. Their increasing success can be explained with the economic crisis affecting many countries in Europe, which make the restrictive financial and budget measures requested by the European institutions very unpopular and opposed. Not only countries with economic problems are interested by the anti-Euro parties: together with Greece and Italy, also more stable countries like France or United Kingdom, or even wealthy states like Austria, Finland and Germany registered the recent growth of political movements aiming to abolish austerity measures, the monetary Union or even the European boundaries. Although such populist discourses are pretty much diffused in all these countries, the level of consent these parties are collecting is very different from one state to another. Aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the amount of support gained by anti-Euro movements and the legislation on political parties existing in the above mentioned countries. Final goal of this paper is to consider if it is possible to identify a certain mutual influence between party legislation and voters’ preferences for the Anti-Euro parties.Protest and anti-European parties have recently become very popular in many member States of the EU. Their increasing success can be explained with the economic crisis affecting many countries in Europe, which make the restrictive financial and budget measures requested by the European institutions very unpopular and opposed. Not only countries with economic problems are interested by the anti-Euro parties: together with Greece and Italy, also more stable countries like France or United Kingdom, or even wealthy states like Austria, Finland and Germany registered the recent growth of political movements aiming to abolish austerity measures, the monetary Union or even the European boundaries. Although such populist discourses are pretty much diffused in all these countries, the level of consent these parties are collecting is very different from one state to another. Aim of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the amount of support gained by anti-Euro movements and the legislation on political parties existing in the above mentioned countries. Final goal of this paper is to consider if it is possible to identify a certain mutual influence between party legislation and voters’ preferences for the Anti-Euro parties.Refereed Working Papers / of international relevanc