11:00 - 13:15
Thursday-Panel
Chair/s:
Liisa Talving
Discussant/s:
Isabel Ruiz
Meeting Room I

Nina Obermeier
We are (almost) all internationalists now: How right-wing populism drives support for international economic integration in post-crisis Europe

Liisa Talving
A new divide in New Europe: Deepening conflict over globalisation in Central and Eastern Europe

Massimo Troncone, Roberto Valli
A Europe of Minorities: Domestic Minority Status and Support for the European Union
We are (almost) all internationalists now: How right-wing populism drives support for international economic integration in post-crisis Europe
Nina Obermeier
Cornell University

In the last decade, political parties that are opposed to international economic integration (free trade, European integration, and immigration) have become increasingly electorally successful. However, public opinion surveys suggest that, at the same time, Europeans are becoming more supportive of international economic integration. How can we explain these diverging trends? In this paper, I argue that Europeans have become more internationalist over the last decade because they increasingly associate anti-internationalism with extremism. While right-wing populist parties initially rose to prominence on primarily anti-internationalist platforms in the wake of the eurozone crisis in Western Europe, they have increasingly de-emphasized anti-internationalism in favor of other issue areas, on which their positions are recognized as extreme. Media coverage that has amplified both anti-internationalism and extremism by right-wing populist parties has reinforced the association between them in the minds of individuals. As a result, individuals who reject the extremism associated with right-wing populist parties increasingly come to see anti-internationalism as a hallmark of extremists and therefore reject it as well. To test this argument, I conduct an original media analysis for nine Western European countries using supervised machine learning based on hand-coded newspaper articles. I combine the results from this analysis with Eurobarometer survey data to show the relationship between media discourse and support for international economic integration. This research has important implications for our understanding of public opinion towards international economic integration, as it suggests the need to contextualize individuals’ attitudes within the broader political discourse.