The Persistence of Government Support in EU Countries

Abstract

Aiming to fill in the gaps in the existing body of political support research, we engage in an extensive analysis of its persistence in a multi-country setting. To be specific, this is an initial attempt to estimate the fractional integration order of government support across the so far neglected EU countries. Exploiting the benefits of the Comparative Political Data Set (CPDS), we reveal that the support of both left- and right-wing parties in national governments mostly exhibits limited memory and relatively low persistence. Our findings are robust across the EU countries (with very few exceptions) and are supported
by two out of three fractional integration estimators. These results could inform scholars, politicians and EU policy-makers that extraordinary events (related to political support) are usually wiped out of the memory of the typical EU voter rather soon.