Who attacks whom? How populism and Euroscepticism drive cross-national conflict between European party elites
2026-05-28
Populist and Eurosceptic parties’ growing popular support has created a new transnational sociopolitical cleavage that challenges European integration. We hypothesize that disagreements over European integration drive cross-national conflict between party elites, and that party populism—which we show is less strongly related to Euroscepticism than is commonly believed—is an especially important contributor to cross-national elite conflict, independently of Euroscepticism or of the cultural issues debates that animate radical right parties’ domestic agendas. We substantiate our arguments by analyzing machine codings of tens of thousands of news reports of cross-national, elite-level, inter-party cooperation, and conflict between parties in 13 European Union member states between 2001 and 2019.