ABSTRACT

Since the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, European integration has witnessed parallel trends of rising Euroscepticism and increasing numbers of EU referendums and referendum pledges. General publics across Europe have on average become less supportive of European integration in the post-Maastricht era (Eichenberg and Dalton 2007) and Euroscepticism has similarly been on the rise as a party political phenomenon. In most national party systems in the EU, pro-European mainstream parties have come to be challenged by one or more Eurosceptic parties which are typically positioned towards the ideological extremes (Taggart 1998; Sitter 2002). Even nominally pro-European parties increasingly have Eurosceptic factions, and intraparty divisions on Europe have in general become more common and intense (Ray 1999). The widespread Eurosceptic contestation of European integration, both in terms of interparty and intraparty politics, is reflected in the rising salience of the issue in virtually all party systems across Europe (Steenbergen and Scott 2004; Benoit and Laver 2006; Hooghe and Marks 2006).