Replication Data for: European voters in the face of crisis: The prominence of unemployment

From a politics-centred perspective, an economic crisis is an external shock which deeply affects the functioning of a political system. Moving from the 1999 to the 2014 European elections, this paper aims to analyse how and to what extent the 2008 economic crisis affected the traditional electoral patterns of EU Member States. After a description of data and methods, the article analyses data across two timeframes: before and after the outbreak of the crisis. The analysis focuses on the electoral performance of both parties in government and Eurosceptic parties. It includes both descriptive and an inferential analysis aimed at answering two questions: first, if and why the loss of governing parties is greater during the crisis than before; and, second, if and why Eurosceptic parties have become more prominent after the onset of the crisis. Variation of unemployment rate is considered as the most important independent variable to explain these trends. To reach these aims, it has been collect electoral, instituional, and macroeconomic data.