Research

My research interests lie at the intersection of comparative politics, European integration, and historical political economy, with a particular focus on political parties and party competition. I am especially interested in how the historical development of party systems shapes contemporary political conflict: why ostensibly similar issues are incorporated into established patterns of competition in some countries but become disruptive, cross-cutting issues in others, as well as the implications of these partisan alignments for national preferences and, ultimately, international cooperation.

Methodologically, I combine quantitative and qualitative approaches, including statistical analysis, comparative historical research, and process tracing. I am also interested in computational methods for studying political text. As part of my doctoral research, I am assembling and analysing a multilingual corpus of parliamentary debates covering European democracies over the long run in order to study the evolution and politicisation of European integration.

Doctoral Thesis

My doctoral thesis examines how domestic party competition shapes European integration. Rather than treating national preferences simply as reflections of economic interests, I examine how they are structured by party competition and by the historical development of national party systems.

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I argue that a crucial source of this variation is whether European integration aligns with the dominant dimension of political competition. Where Europe cuts across established partisan alignments, it can function as a wedge issue: challenger parties have incentives to mobilise it, mainstream parties face greater internal divisions, and governments become more constrained in adopting positions on further integration. Where European integration is instead embedded within the principal dimension of party competition, parties can develop more stable positions and constituencies around it, making such mobilisation less disruptive.

The origins of this variation, I argue, are historical. In democracies whose party systems developed before European integration became politically salient, established parties formed their constituencies, reputations, and platforms around earlier conflicts (the class cleavage especially). Europe subsequently entered these systems as a new and cross-cutting issue. In countries that democratised later, however, party system formation occurred when European integration was already a concrete and politically salient project. Parties could therefore incorporate positions towards Europe into their political identities from their inception. Whether these early alignments endure depends in turn on subsequent party institutionalisation: where parties remain stable and socially rooted, the political alignments established during democratisation are more likely to persist.

My thesis investigates this argument in two stages. The first examines the long-run development of party competition and asks how the timing of democratisation, the salience of European integration during party system formation, and subsequent party institutionalisation shape the mobilisation of Euroscepticism. One component of this research constructs new measures of the salience of European integration from historical parliamentary debates across European countries, complementing existing manifesto and expert-survey data. Part of this component forms a working paper listed below.

The second stage connects these domestic processes to European-level outcomes, and looks more closely at variation in how different forms of integration relate to the dominant dimension of competition. Politicisation brings questions of European integration out of relatively insulated executive and technocratic arenas and forces governments to anticipate electoral, partisan, and ratification constraints. I examine how these domestically formed preferences constrain governments during intergovernmental bargaining and thereby affect the possibilities for further integration. The historical analysis centres on two paired comparisons between major and almost contemporaneous episodes in which further integration was seriously contemplated but produced different outcomes: the failure of the European Defence Community and the subsequent creation of the European Economic Community; and the failure of the Constitutional Treaty and its relationship to the later Treaty of Lisbon.

Publications

Benoit, L. & Amaro, D. (2026). “Different signals, same message? Evidence of mainstream accommodation of the radical right on European integration using parliamentary speeches.” Journal of European Public Policy, 1–27.

Abstract

What drives mainstream parties’ reactions to the success of the radical right? Existing research shows that mainstream parties respond by moving closer to the radical right but most studies focus on long-term adjustments based on past election results, overlooking shifts within electoral cycles and not distinguishing between different sources of information on which mainstream parties might rely. We argue that the type of electoral signal (actual vote share versus projected success in opinion polls) as well as its credibility as an indicator of challenger strength (whether the radical right is represented in parliament) is crucial. Drawing on ParlSpeech data, we analyse plenary speeches from seven legislatures over a 20-year period and measure party positions on the EU at the quarter-year level with two fine-tuned multilingual classifiers based on XLM-RoBERTa. We find that mainstream parties adopt more Eurosceptic stances in reaction to increases in support for the radical right, both when measured as share of the vote in the previous elections and as the share of the vote as predicted by opinion polls. This is only the case when the radical right is represented in parliament. However, we find no evidence that mainstream accommodation intensifies as elections draw nearer.

Working papers

Before Their Time: How the Timing of Democratisation Affects Challenger Party Euroscepticism

Abstract

Under what conditions do radical right parties mobilise opposition to European integration? I question the prevailing assumption that European integration is always a new issue, orthogonal to the dominant dimension of competition, and suggest that the timing of democratisation should be considered. When party system formation took place after the onset of the European project, parties founded at the time could take stances on European integration and form their constituencies and reputations on its basis, subsuming the issue under an existing dimension of competition. The salience of European integration during the transition to democracy should moderate the association between current party positions on the EU and on the GAL-TAN dimension. Subsequent party institutionalisation, as the transmission mechanism behind this legacy, is a crucial scope condition. I test this quantitatively using CHES data on contemporary party positions as well as text analysis of over a century of parliamentary speeches. This is complemented by two case studies of late democracies (Portugal and Poland). The findings conform to the theoretical expectations, emphasising the importance of national-historical factors in explaining variation in party system dimensionality.

Education or Ethic? The Long-Term Impact of Protestantism on Electoral Behaviour in France (with L. Sattelmayer)

Abstract

How does a religious conflict become a political cleavage? How does it persist, and how is it remobilised, even when the structural conditions that prompted its emergence have disappeared? This paper examines the long-term association between Protestant settlement and support for the Left in France. Protestants in France, and particularly Calvinists, were a religious minority who underwent centuries of violent persecution from the Reformation onwards. This religious conflict fostered a persistent association between Protestant milieux and support for freedom of religion, constitutional liberalism, and Republican values, and an equally persistent perception that the Left was the political force best able to defend these. We use newly assembled, commune-level data on the Protestant population in France derived from an 1839 government-mandated survey of the non-Catholic churches. To our knowledge, this is the earliest available dataset on the Calvinist population in France at this level of granularity. This is combined with historical and contemporary data, including election results. As expected, the historical size of the Protestant population is negatively associated with support for the Radical Right, even controlling for education. The coefficient declines in magnitude throughout the Third Republic, as the regime question seems increasingly settled, reaching its nadir in the Fourth and early Fifth Republics, before increasing again in recent decades, in parallel with the rise of the radical right. This paper connects classic scholarship on cleavage theory with recent work on how minority status can foster liberal commitments while also contributing to broader debates on the persistence of historical institutions and religious legacies.