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Special Issue ”A new normal? The 2024 EP elections amidst old and new challenges”

Party competition on European issues in the 2024 EP elections

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Supplementary Materials - Just Accepted
  • Giuseppe Carteny,
  • Daniela Braun,
  • Alexander Hartland,
  • Ann-Kathrin Reinl
Giuseppe Carteny
Saarland University
Bio
Daniela Braun
Saarland University
Bio
Alexander Hartland
Saarland University
Bio
Ann-Kathrin Reinl
Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Bio
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-17373

Published 2025-08-12

Keywords

  • Party Competition,
  • European Parliament Elections,
  • Large Language Models,
  • European Integration

How to Cite

Carteny, G., Braun, D., Hartland, A., & Reinl, A.-K. (2025). Party competition on European issues in the 2024 EP elections. Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES). https://doi.org/10.36253/qoe-17373

Copyright (c) 2025 Giuseppe Carteny, Daniela Braun, Alexander Hartland, Ann-Kathrin Reinl

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

Recent developments have turned European integration from a “sleeping giant” into an active political issue. The Maastricht Treaty politicized Europe in national and European Parliament elections. Cross-border crises, like migration and environmental challenges, have further increased the importance of coordinated EU responses. Moreover, an entirely new family of Eurosceptic parties has emerged and consolidated over the past decade. Given that one of their main aims is to challenge and criticise the European Union (EU), Eurosceptic parties have a particular interest in European issues - the European polity as well as major European policies. Against this background, this paper examines whether and how political parties have emphasised these issues during the 2024 EP elections, compared to 2019, and contrasting Eurosceptic and mainstream parties. Drawing on annotated data from the 2019 Euromanifesto project, we fine-tune transformer-based deep learning multilingual models to detect parties' salience and positions on European polity and policy issues in nine countries during the 2024 EP elections. Our analyses show that the salience of European issues has increased on average, in particular for the EU polity. In terms of positions, we detect a pattern of increasing negativity of mainstream parties on European policy issues, such as migration and the environment, whereas Eurosceptic parties (in particular of the far-right) appear to have become less negative on the EU. In sum, our results suggest an increasing relevance of EU-wide issues, with different patterns of polarisation.

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Supplementary Materials - Just Accepted

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