Divided Over Redistribution: Europarty Manifestos and the Integration of Core State Powers
摘要
Having long shied away from proactively politicizing issues of European integration, the past crisis decade put generally pro-EU parties under pressure to spell out more clearly which kind of Europe they support. We distinguish two such fundamental ideas of Europe: the redistributive polity, organizing transnational solidarity, and the regulatory polity, strengthening national self-reliance. Both notions are integrationist but they come with distinct policy implications. How do Europarties position themselves on either of these polity ideas? We investigate this question on Europarty manifestos published in the run-up to the 2024 EP elections. Party support for redistribution, we find, is generally driven by their ideological positioning. While progressive and left parties tend towards EU-level redistribution in areas of taxation and fiscal policy, conservative and right parties are more supportive of European solidarity in the domains of internal security, defence, and border and migration policy. Our analysis demonstrates that mainstream parties competed visibly over EU-level redistribution in the run-up to the 2024 EP elections, providing voters with a clearer choice for different notions of EU integration beyond just voting for pro- or anti-European forces.