Why do Europhiles Vote for Eurosceptic Parties? The Case of the 2014 European Election

Following the last European elections of May 2014, a large number of parliamentary seats were obtained by «hard» eurosceptic parties, which are advocating for their country to leave the European Union and displaying a principled opposition to it. There is nevertheless among their voters citizens who believe their country’s membership to the EU to be a good thing. This paper aims to explain why those europhiles voted for eurosceptic parties. Basing this research on theories such as «issue voting» and EU salience, we put forward two hypotheses: the more a europhile voter has pointed out economic issues, either economic growth (H1a) or unemployment (H1b) as being the most important electoral issue, the more likely is he or she to vote for a eurosceptic party, and the more a europhile voter has pointed out immigration as being the most important electoral issue, the more likely is he or she to vote for a eurosceptic party (H2). We analyse 96 European political parties or parties coalitions from 13 member states, out of which 15 we consider to be hard eurosceptics. The data we use come from the “European Parliament Election Study 2014, Voter Study, First Post-Election Survey” and the “Chapel Hill Expert Survey”. We will obtain the results with a linear regression