Explaining Turkish Party and Public Support for the EU

The three main Turkish political parties, the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Republican People's Party (CHP) and the Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), each favor Turkish accession to the European Union, with varying degrees of reservations. Turkish public support for EU membership is also divided, with recent surveys showing only 50% of the population views the EU positively. In this paper, we first evaluate the extent of support for European integration among Turkish mainstream and minor parties using Chapel Hill Expert Survey data and case studies. Next, building from the vast literature on public and party support for the EU in western European states, we develop utilitarian and identity hypotheses to explain public support. Using Eurobarometer data, we test these explanations. In this analysis, we compare Turkish parties and public to their counterparts in eastern and western Europe

TIME TO RECONSIDER? THE CHAOS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AND TURKISH SUPPORT FOR THE EU

Support for European integration among Turks has dropped from 67% in 2002 to 34% in 2008, with only 42% of Turks supporting enlargement in a 2011 Eurobarometer. As previous research on Turkish Euroskepticism has demonstrated, the opposition to Turkish enlargement within European states—the so-called ‘Turkoskepticism,’ as well as Turkish economic growth and identity-based concerns are likely reasons for this declining trend. In this study, we push these findings further to demonstrate the effects of Turkish foreign policy on EU support. Do the Turks find the EU more favorable as their concerns on Iran, political Islam, or the Syrian civil war increase? Using Pew Global Attitudes Project survey from 2013, we demonstrate that as Turks view their regional neighborhood increasingly volatile and threatening, they see the European Union as a more favorable actor. This effect is consistent across different model specifications, and illustrates that concerns over the international political context is just as important in explaining Turkish public attitudes toward the EU as some of the well-established utilitarian explanations of support

Mapping Europe’s party systems: which parties are the most right-wing and left-wing in Europe?

Within individual countries there is usually a good understanding of how parties differ from one another on economic issues, but how do parties in different European countries compare? Would Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats lie to the right of Mariano Rajoy’s People’s Party in Spain? Is the British Labour Party to the left of other centre-left parties in Europe? Based on data from expert surveys, Ryan Bakker, Seth Jolly and Jonathan Polk map the left/right positions of political parties from 14 eastern and western European countries. They write that while this comparison gives a good indication of party competition across Europe, future research will also allow for European parties to be compared on non-economic dimensions and with parties in other parts of the world such as North America

Analyzing the cross-national comparability of Party Positions on the Socio-Cultural and EU Dimensions in Europe

Using survey vignettes and scaling techniques, we estimate common socio-cultural and European integration dimensions for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Previous research shows that economic left/right travels well across the EU, meaning that the placements of parties on that dimension are cross- nationally comparable; however, the social dimension is more complex, with different issues forming the core of the social dimension in different countries. The 2014 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as \bridge votes" to place parties from different countries on a common social liberal/authoritarian dimension and a separate common scale for European integration. We estimate the dimensions using the Bayesian Aldrich-McKelvey technique. The resulting scales offer cross-nationally comparable interval-level measures of a party's social and EU ideological positions

The European Common Space: Extending the Use of Anchoring Vignettes

In this article, we combine advances in both survey research and scaling techniques to estimate a common dimension for political parties across the member states of the European Union. Most previous scholarship has either ignored or assumed cross-national comparability of party placements across a variety of dimensions. The 2010 wave of the Chapel Hill Expert Survey includes anchoring vignettes which we use as “bridge votes” to place parties from different countries on a common space. We estimate our dimensions using the “blackbox” technique. Our results demonstrate both the usefulness of anchoring vignettes and the broad applicability of the blackbox scaling routine. Further, the resulting scale offers a cross-nationally comparable interval-level measure of a party’s left/right ideological position with a high degree of face validity. In short, we argue that the left/right economic dimension travels well across European countries

Multidimensional Incongruence, Political Disaffection, and Support for Anti-Establishment Parties.

To what extent do representational gaps between parties and voters destabilize party systems and create electoral opportunities for anti-establishment parties on the left and right? In this paper, we use multiple measures of party-partisan incongruence to evaluate whether issue-level incongruence contributes to an increase of political disaffection and anti-establishment politics. For this analysis, we use data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) for party positions and public opinion data from the European Election Study (EES). Our fi ndings indicate that multidimensional incongruence is associated with disaffection at the national and European level, and that disffected mainstream party voters are in turn more likely to consider voting for anti-establishment challenger parties. This nding suggests that perceived gaps in party-citizen substantive representation have important electoral ramifi cations across European democracies

Salmonella – At Home in the Host Cell

The Gram-negative bacterium Salmonella enterica has developed an array of sophisticated tools to manipulate the host cell and establish an intracellular niche, for successful propagation as a facultative intracellular pathogen. While Salmonella exerts diverse effects on its host cell, only the cell biology of the classic “trigger”-mediated invasion process and the subsequent development of the Salmonella-containing vacuole have been investigated extensively. These processes are dependent on cohorts of effector proteins translocated into host cells by two type III secretion systems (T3SS), although T3SS-independent mechanisms of entry may be important for invasion of certain host cell types. Recent studies into the intracellular lifestyle of Salmonella have provided new insights into the mechanisms used by this pathogen to modulate its intracellular environment. Here we discuss current knowledge of Salmonella-host interactions including invasion and establishment of an intracellular niche within the host

Who opposes the EU? continuity and change in party Euroscepticism between 2014 and 2019

A new round of data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, covering 2019, is due to be released. The survey, which estimates the positions of political parties on a variety of ideological and policy issues, offers an invaluable tool for assessing political competition in Europe. Ryan Bakker, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Gary Marks, Jonathan Polk, Jan Rovny, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Anna Vachudova draw on the latest data to examine where European political parties now stand on European integration, and how their positions have changed since the last full survey was conducted in 2014

Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data

This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset

Contesting Covid : the ideological bases of partisan responses to the Covid-19 pandemic

First published: 31 January 2022How do political parties respond to external shocks? Using an original survey of political parties across Europe conducted in June 2020 and Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) data on partisan ideological positioning, we argue that the pre-existing ideological stances of Europe’s political parties shaped their response to emerging Covid19 policy issues, including the tension between economic normalization and containment, legal versus voluntary enforcement and the role of science in policymaking. We find that party ideology powerfully predicts how parties, both in government and in opposition, responded to the pandemic.Article also appear in The COVID-19 Issue First published: 20 September 2021, Last updated: 28 February 202