The Europeanisation of national party organisations: A conceptual analysis (original) (raw)
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The Role of Political Parties in the European Union
At the national level, political parties play an important role in making representative democracy work. They help to aggregate and communicate policy preferences, link decision-making between different legislative bodies and hold politicians accountable. In the European Union, however, the electoral connection is weak. This casts doubt on the impact of partisan politics at the European level. Are political parties able to fulfil their role as 'transmission belts' ensuring political accountability and consistent decisionmaking in the European Union? To answer this question we look at the micro foundations of partisan politics in the European Union. The contributions in this volume all depart from a common theoretical framework but use a wide range of empirical data and research designs, covering qualitative process-tracing, elite interview and large-N quantitative analysis. Moreover, they examine party effects in the electoral and legislative arena. Finally, the volume covers all European institutions: the Commission, the Council of the European Union, the European Council and the European Parliament. The findings enhance our understanding of the workings of decision-making in Brussels, add to the debate on the EU democratic deficit, and highlight the usefulness of drawing upon insights from the literature on Comparative Politics when studying the European Union. This book was published as a special issue of the Journal of European Public Policy.
Political Parties in the European Union
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 2019
Media often portrays European Union (EU) decision-making as a battleground for national governments that defend the interests of their member states. Yet even the most powerful individuals, such as the German chancellor, the French president, or the Commission president, are party politicians. At the same time the consistent empowerment of the European Parliament (EP) means that the party groups of European-level "Europarties"-political parties at European level-are in a key position to shape EU legislation. The Parliament has also become more directly involved in the appointment of the Commission, with the results of EP elections thus influencing the composition of the Commission. Examining the "partyness" of European integration, this article argues that scholarly understanding of the role of parties in the EU political system has taken great strides forward since the turn of the millennium. This applies especially to the EP party groups, with research focusing particularly on voting patterns in the plenary. This body of work has become considerably more sophisticated and detailed over the years; it shows that the main EP groups do achieve even surprisingly high levels of cohesion and that the left-right dimension is the primary axis of contestation in the chamber. It nonetheless also emphasizes the continuing relevance of national parties that control candidate selection in EP elections. Considering that most votes in the Parliament are based on cooperation between the two largest groups, the center-right European People's Party (EPP) and the center-left Party of the European Socialists (PES), future research should analyze in more detail how these groups build compromises. Actual Europarties, however, remain relatively unexplored. Case studies of treaty reforms or particular policy sectors reveal how individual Europarties have often wielded decisive influence on key integration decisions or key appointments to EU institutions. The Europarty meetings held in conjunction with European Council summits are particularly important in this respect. The regular, day-today activities of Europarties deserve more attention, both regarding decision-making and vertical links between national parties and their Europarties. Overall, it is probably more accurate to characterize Europarties as networks of like-minded national parties or as loose federations of member parties, especially when compared with the often centralized and strongly disciplined parties found in the member states.
Party politics in the European Council
Journal of European Public Policy, 2010
This article explores the extent to which the growing party politicization of the EU extends to the European Council. We advance the argument that three central factors shape the extent to which party politics influences European Council outcomes: the salience of an issue along the left–right dimension, the partisan composition of the European Council, and the cohesion and mobilization of transnational parties. We explore the influence of these factors empirically through an inventory of élite interview evidence as well as two case studies – the employment chapter of the Amsterdam Treaty and the Lisbon agenda. We conclude that the conditions for party influence in the European Council are demanding, and that the scope for party politicization is less extensive than in the other major EU institutions. The issues on the agenda of the European Council often cut across partisan divides, the heads of government are seldom mobilized along transnational party lines, and decision outcomes instead tend to reflect issue-specific coalition patterns.
At the heart of the growing politicization of the EU lies a concern with how European integration potentially undermines forms of communal self-government linked to established political identities. This concern originates not from the much discussed democratic deficit of EU institutions but from a 'democratic disconnect' between domestic democratic institutions and processes and the decisions made at the EU level by national executives and EU officials. Our contention is that enhancing the role of national parliaments in EU decision-making offers a way to reconnect the integration process with the communal self-rule of the member states. We ground this argument in an account of the normative basis of the EU that we dub 'republican intergovernmentalism'. We argue that national parliaments offer a means for what we term the domestication and normalization of EU policy-making within the democratic processes of the member states. However, these effects will only occur if mainstream domestic parties employ these new parliamentary powers to develop competing EU policies that reflect their core ideological positions and those of their voters. We propose the introduction of a Parliamentary Legislative Initiative as a mechanism to provide an incentive for them to do so.
Drifting Further Apart: National Parties and their Electorates on the EU Dimension
West European Politics, 2012
Whether parties are representative of their voters over the EU is a key concern in modern European governance. Using European Election Studies data, this article compares opinion congruence between parties and their electorates on the EU dimension in 2004 and 2009 and examines, at the levels of both member states and individual parties, which factors explain variation in opinion congruence
Political Parties, delegation and Europeanisation: A Conceptual Framework
[From the introduction]. A great deal of research, both normative and empirical and too voluminous to be listed here, has been devoted to this democratic deficit. But the vast majority of it focuses on the institutions of the Union. Only a small, albeit growing, section takes up the effect of European integration on national political parties; and only a small proportion of that looks inside the parties at the internal mechanisms of democratic accountability that they contain. This paper is a part of an attempt to help fill this gap. It serves as a draft introduction to an ongoing research project that investigates the effect of European integration on Nordic political parties - that is, the parties represented in the national parliaments of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The aims of the project are threefold. First, it seeks to peer into the black box of party organisation, and to do so through a rather conceptual lens, that of a principal-agent model. In doing so, ...
2003
Over the last few years, Europeanisation has become increasingly popular in the literature on European integration. In most of these studies, Europeanisation is defi ned as the domestic impact of EU regulation. This paper will follow that ʻmainstreamʼ conceptualisation, by focusing on the top down effect. Whereas most attention has been paid to changes in national policy, due to a ʻmisfi tʼ with EU regulation, this paper considers the effect on politics, in particular party programmes. The most recent election programmes of the main parties in the Netherlands and the United Kingdom are analysed, based on a threefold categorisation of references to the EU. These categories include the institutionalisation of the EU, the division of competences between the national and the EU level, and the penetration of EU policy into national politics. The results show that parties tend to focus on EU policy and institutions, whilst paying little attention to the impact of Europe and the limits set to national party agendas. Moreover, there is a clear difference in the way in which Europe has become an integral part of the party programme. Finally, the paper offers two suggestions for further research. First, to see to what extent party positions on the EU have an effect on policy competition and electoral competition. Second, to expand the research on EU and parties, by including the impact on party organisational aspects.
Italian Journal of Electoral Studies (IJES), 2021
This article empirically revisits and tests the effect of individual distance from parties on the EU integration dimension and on the left–right dimension for vote choice in both national and European elections. This analysis is based on the unique European Election Study (EES) 2014 survey panel data from seven EU countries. Our findings show that in most countries the effect of individual distance on the EU integration dimension is positive and significant for both European and national elections. Yet the effect of this dimension is not uniform across all seven countries, revealing two scenarios: one in which it is only relevant for Eurosceptic voters and the other in which it is significant for voters of most parties in the system. The first is mainly related to the presence of a ‘hard’ Eurosceptic party in the party supply, but the second, which indicates a more advanced level of Europeanisation of party systems, is not explained by most current theoretical and empirical contribu...
Zooming in on the ‘Europeanisation’ of national politics: A comparative analysis of six EU countries
Quaderni dell Osservatorio elettorale QOE - IJES, 2021
This article empirically revisits and tests the effect of individual distance from parties on the EU integration dimension and on the left–right dimension for vote choice in both national and European elections. This analysis is based on the unique European Election Study (EES) 2014 survey panel data from seven EU countries. Our findings show that in most countries the effect of individual distance on the EU integration dimension is positive and significant for both European and national elections. Yet the effect of this dimension is not uniform across all seven countries, revealing two scenarios: one in which it is only relevant for Eurosceptic voters and the other in which it is significant for voters of most parties in the system. The first is mainly related to the presence of a ‘hard’ Eurosceptic party in the party supply, but the second, which indicates a more advanced level of Europeanisation of party systems, is not explained by most current theoretical and empirical contribu...