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The impact of EU decision-making on national parties’ attitudes towards European integration
Abstract
This study examines the implications of EU decision-making for national parties’ support for European integration. We argue, first, that EU decision-making promotes the support of parties that were closely located to EU outcomes. Second, we expect higher support of parties with governmental experience due to their access to key offices in EU decision-making. For the period from 1979 to 2012, we measure and interact both variables with the political, parliamentary and decentralizing nature of EU acts. In addition to the expected effects of outcome distance and government participation, we find that non-bureaucratic legislation generally improves national parties’ attitudes towards European integration. The involvement of the European Parliament increases the support of more distant parties, but discourages parties with high governmental experience. Finally, peripherally located (government) parties appreciate the decentral discretion of directives.
This study compares the explanatory power of intergovernmentalism and national partyism for European integration in the post‐Maastricht era. Using data on the issue‐specific positions of all heads of state and government at the Amsterdam, Nice and Lisbon conferences, I identify a common policy space with latent preferences and outcomes on two integration dimensions, the design of governance and the pooling of policy competences. The findings show that partisan ideology characterizes leaders’ preferences for the pooling of policy competences, which helps to find compromise among the leaders from large/rich and small/poor countries on governance design. Due to their credible referendum threat, leaders from smaller countries dominate interstate bargains in the post‐Maastricht era. This implies institutional choices for a separation of powers with a bicameral legislature, which promotes functionalist responsibility at the expense of responsiveness to the concerns of the voters.
That citizens of European Union countries differ in their attitudes regarding Europe is a commonplace of political commentary. Some favor their country’s membership in the EU, others oppose it. Some, while thinking that membership is generally a good thing, feel that steps toward unification have gone far enough – or even too far. Others believe that further steps should be taken.Citizens of EU countries also differ in terms of more traditional political orientations – attitudes to the proper role of government in society, welfare provision, and other matters which have increasingly over the past half-century come to be subsumed within a single orientation towards government action, generally referred to as the left/right orientation (Lipset 1960; Lijphart 1980; Franklin, Mackie, Valen, et al., 1992).These two orientations are often assumed to be orthogonal, with the newer pro-/anti-EU orientation cutting across the more traditional left/right orientation (see, e.g., Hicks and Lord 1998; Hooghe and Marks 1999). Our own research (van der Eijk and Franklin 1996; van der Eijk, Franklin, and van der Brug 1999; van der Brug, Franklin, and van der Eijk 2000) demonstrates that EU orientation does not currently have much impact on party choice at EU elections. Elections to the European Parliament have been described as “second-order national” elections at which the arena supposedly at issue (the European arena) takes second place to the national arena as a focus for issue and representational concerns (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Reif 1984, 1985; Marsh and Franklin 1996); and the national arena is quintessentially one in which left/right orientations dominate.
Do parties respond to voters’ preferences on European integration in elections to the European Parliament? In this article, we argue that political parties do respond to voters’ Euroskeptic attitudes, but that party type conditions responsiveness. In particular, we posit that larger parties are more responsive and that governing parties are less responsive to aggregate Euroskepticism. To test our theoretical expectations, we use data from the Euromanifestos Project and European Election Study from 1989 to 2009 for 252 parties across 26 European Union Member States. Our findings have important implications for understanding democratic representation in the European Union and the second-order nature of elections to the European Parliament.
Multiplicative interaction models are common in the quantitative political science literature. This is so for good reason.
Institutional arguments frequently imply that the relationship between political inputs and outcomes varies depending on the
institutional context. Models of strategic interaction typically produce conditional hypotheses as well. Although conditional
hypotheses are ubiquitous in political science and multiplicative interaction models have been found to capture their intuition
quite well, a survey of the top three political science journals from 1998 to 2002 suggests that the execution of these models
is often flawed and inferential errors are common. We believe that considerable progress in our understanding of the political
world can occur if scholars follow the simple checklist of dos and don'ts for using multiplicative interaction models presented
in this article. Only 10% of the articles in our survey followed the checklist.
This article questions the utility of assessing radical right party placement on economic issues, which has been extensively analyzed in academic literature. Starting from the premise that political parties have varying strategic stakes in different political issues, the article considers political competition in multiple issue dimensions. It suggests that political competition is not simply a matter of taking positions on political issues, but rather centers on manipulating the dimensional structure of politics. The core argument is that certain political parties, such as those of the radical right, seek to compete on neglected, secondary issues while simultaneously blurring their positions on established issues in order to attract broader support. Deliberate position blurring – considered costly by the literature – may thus be an effective strategy in multidimensional competition. The article combines quantitative analyses of electoral manifestos, expert placement of political parties, and voter preferences, by studying seventeen radical right parties in nine Western European party systems.
This article introduces a novel approach for generating agenda-related estimates of the
policy positions of political parties from party manifestos and expert surveys. We show
that current party estimates provide for little variation across policy areas and over
time. In response, we propose to relate the issue-specific ideological preference profiles
of political parties to the legislative context. For the dimensional representation of
policy positions of political parties our procedure weights the issue-specific preference
profiles by their prominence on the agenda of each policy area. We apply this procedure
to EU legislation and locate national political parties on a national/supranational and left/
right dimension, which can be used for the analysis of Council decision-making
Underlying several theories of European integration is the idea that countries' willingness to sign up to supranational rules is dependent on the expectation and/or realization of various benefits. In this paper, we explore whether such benefits also affect member states' implementation of these rules. Using econometric techniques, we estimate the influence of several measures of membership benefits on the annual number of legal infringements received by 15 member states over the period from 1978 to 1999. Our results provide qualified support for the idea that benefits positively influence compliance. We find that greater intra-EU trade dependence and voting power in European institutions relative to population size are negatively associated with legal infringements. Yet, contrary to a priori expectations, net fiscal transfers are positively correlated with infringements.
Scholars have raised doubts about the ability of political parties to fulfil their traditional role as 'transmission belts' between citizens and legislators in the EU. We discuss how the different institutional environment of the EU affects the assumptions and predictions of theories of political parties developed for the national context and discuss how political parties can influence EU legislative decision-making. We distinguish between partisan effects in the electoral and legis-lative arena, and argue for a clear distinction between the effects of national parties, national party delegations and transnational party groups when studying EU party politics. The empirical literature shows that, whereas parties play a role in most insti-tutions, they are not always the dominant players, and their effect varies both across and within these institutions.
This paper provides a theory of legislative institutions that parallels the theory of the firm and the theory of contractual institutions. Like market institutions, legislative institutions reflect two key components: the goals or preferences of individuals (here, representatives seeking reelection) and the relevant transactions costs. The authors present three conclusions. First, they show how the legislative institutions enforce bargains among legislators. Second, they explain why, given the peculiar form of bargaining problems found in legislatures, specific forms of nonmarket exchange prove superior to market exchange. Third, their approach shows how the committee system limits the types of coalitions that may form on a particular issue. Copyright 1988 by University of Chicago Press.
"The thesis of this paper is that restrictions on the ability of a parent body to amend committee proposals can enhance the informational role of committees. More precisely, restrictive procedures can encourage committees to gather information and can facilitate the adoption of informed policies that are jointly beneficial to the committee and parent body. Thus, acting in its self-interest, the parent body often restricts its ability to amend committee proposals."
Giandomenico Majone and Andrew Moravcsik have argued that the EU does not suffer a 'democratic deficit'. We disagree about one key element: whether a democratic polity requires contestation for political leadership and over policy. This aspect is an essential element of even the 'thinnest' theories of democracy, yet is conspicuously absent in the EU. Copyright 2006 The Author(s).
Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are only now becoming apparent. The editors of this 2004 volume, Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, have brought together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict that are arising in the European Union. Using diverse sources of data, and examining a range of actors, including citizens, political parties, members of the European Parliament, social movements, and interest groups, the authors of this volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is indeed rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years. This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of political conflict in the European Union.
The article compares analytically populism and technocracy as alternative forms of political representation to party government. It argues that populist and technocratic principles of representation challenge fundamental features of party democracy. The two alternative forms of representation are addressed theoretically from the perspective of political representation. First, the article identifies the commonalities between the two forms of representation: both populism and technocracy are based on a unitary, nonpluralist, unmediated, and unaccountable vision of society's general interest. Second, it highlights their differences. Technocracy stresses responsibility and requires voters to entrust authority to experts who identify the general interest from rational speculation. Populism stresses responsiveness and requires voters to delegate authority to leaders who equate the general interest with a putative will of the people. While the populist form of representation has received considerable attention, the technocratic one has been neglected. The article presents a more complete picture of the analytical relationship between them.
This article develops a game-theoretical model of European Union (EU) policy making that suggests that the amount of legislative activity depends on the size of the gridlock interval. This is consistent with Krehbiel's study of US politics. This interval depends on two factors: (1) the preference configuration of the political actors and (2) the legislative procedures used in a particular period. Actors' preferences and procedures are not expected to have any effect beyond their impact on the gridlock interval. The study predicts smaller gridlock intervals, and thus more legislative activity, under the co-decision (consultation) procedure when the pivotal member states and the European Parliament (Commission) are closer to each other. More activity is expected under qualified majority voting in the Council than under unanimity. The results find support for these propositions in an empirical analysis of EU legislative activity between 1979 and 2009.
The far right party family is the fastest-growing party family in Europe. In addition to describing the ideological makeup of the far right party family, this review examines demand-side and supply-side explanations for its electoral success. Demand-side explanations focus on the grievances that create the "demand" for far right parties, whereas supply-side explanations focus on how the choices that far right parties make and the political opportunity structure in which they act influence their success. The review finishes by suggesting that far right scholars must recognize the interaction between demand-side and supply-side factors in their empirical analyses in order to draw valid inferences and that it would be productive to pay more attention to the political geography of far right support and the different stages of far right success.
The Euro crisis has led to an unprecedented Europeanization and politicization of public spheres across the continent. In this volume, leading scholars make two claims. First, they suggest that transnational crossborder communication in Europe has been encouraged through the gradual Europeanization of national as well as issue-specific public spheres. Second, the politicization of European affairs - at the European Union (EU) level and in the domestic politics of member states - is inevitable and here to stay. Europeanized public spheres, whether elite media, mass media, or social media such as the internet, provide the arenas in which the politicization of European and EU issues takes place. European Public Spheres explores the history of these developments, the nature of politicization in the public spheres as well as its likely consequences, and the normative implications for European public life.
This article analyzes the literature on procedural models of European Union politics. We present an overview of the main models of the legislative procedures, with a focus on their relevance to European Union politics and the literature today. We discuss early controversies in the literature and examine the empirical research that tested the models. Furthermore, we consider models of other aspects of policy-making in the European Union. Finally, we discuss the literature's main contributions and principal shortcomings and formulate suggestions for improvement. We argue that the models contribute greatly to our understanding of European Union politics, offer clear predictions regarding policies, institutions' powers, and the extent of gridlock and have sparked extensive empirical research. The models of consultation and codecision can serve as standard models of unicameral legislatures with an agenda setter and bicameral legislatures with bargaining between the two chambers, respectively. Moreover, they contribute to the study of the implications of institutional reform. © The Author(s) 2014 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav.
The core puzzle which this book resolves is to explain why radical right parties have advanced in a diverse array of democracies--including Austria, Canada, Norway, France, Italy, New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, Romania, Russia, and Chile--while failing to make comparable gains in similar societies elsewhere, such as Sweden, Britain, and the United States. This book expands our understanding of support for radical right parties by presenting an integrated new theory which is then tested systematically using a wealth of cross-national survey evidence covering almost forty countries.
Comprehensive comparative analysis of EU referendums from 1972 to 2008
Variety of sources used including survey data, content analysis of media coverage, experimental studies, and elite interviews not found elsewhere in the literature
How do voters decide in referendums on European integration? Direct democracy has become an increasingly common feature of European politics with important implications for policy-making in the European Union. Attempts to reform the EU treaties have been stalled, and even abandoned, due to no-votes in referendums. Europe in Question sheds new light on the pivotal issue of electoral behaviour in referendums and provides a major contribution to the study of democracy in the European Union and voting behaviour more generally.
Hobolt develops a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding voting behaviour in referendums and presents a comparative analysis of EU referendums from 1972 to 2008. To examine why people vote the way they do, the role of political elites and the impact of the campaign dynamics, this books relies on a variety of sources including survey data, content analysis of media coverage, survey experiments, and elite interviews. The book illustrates the importance of campaign dynamics and elite endorsements in shaping public opinion, electoral mobilization and vote choices. Referendums are often criticized for presenting citizens with choices that are too complex and thereby generating outcomes that have little or no connection with the ballot proposal. Importantly this book shows that voters are smarter than they are often given credit for. They may not be fully informed about European politics, but they do consider the issues at stake before they go to the ballot box and they make use of the information provided by parties and the campaign environment.
Readership: Scholars and students of political science, especially those interested in political behaviour, political parties, and European studies.
According to the literature on parliamentary government, legislatures provide political parties with veto and amendment rights, which counterbalance executive power. This institutional feature is also said to help overcome ministerial “drift” within coalition governments. While this literature has focused on the situation of an unconstrained environment of parliamentary government, the European Union’s Member States continuously delegate policy competencies to Brussels, whose directives must in turn be transposed into national law to take effect. Because the minister in charge enjoys informational advantages and has the sole right to begin the process of implementing directives, he can completely control the agenda in this constrained environment. We evaluate the empirical implications of a ministerial gatekeeping model by investigating the (in)activities of 15 countries with respect to 2,756 EU directives adopted between December 1978 and November 2009. Our findings show that partisan ministerial approval is necessary to start the implementation process which conditions the counterbalancing response of parliaments. Accordingly, the delegation of policy competencies to the European Union changes the power relationship in parliamentary governments and increases the risk of partisan ministerial drift.
This article explores the effects of party organizational strength on party success and survival in the new postcommunist democracies. Organizational strength is defined as extensive network of branch offices, large membership, and professional staff. Using quantitative information on parties in the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, and Poland, the study shows that strong organization helps parties increase their vote share significantly and steadily. Focused comparisons of “most similar” parties with different electoral performance from Estonia and the Czech Republic further exemplify the significant independent role that organizational strength plays in helping parties succeed electorally.
How does legislative gridlock affect the type of legislative output? Do bureaucratic actors expand their activities when the legislature is unlikely to overrule them? This article investigates the impact of legislative gridlock on bureaucratic activities, combining data on all secondary and tertiary legislative acts of the European Union in the period from 1983 to 2009. Compared to secondary legislation, which is decided by the Council and the European Parliament, tertiary legislation is enacted by the European Commission alone. Our findings reveal that bureaucratic activities of the European Commission expand in times of increased legislative gridlock in the Council. The expansionist activities of the bureaucracy are corroborated by our findings about informational complexity and legal foundation: the more complex an act is and the less precise its legal basis, the more likely is tertiary legislation by the bureaucracy. Once the European Commission has received power to enact tertiary legislation, we conclude, there is a significant risk that the type of legislative output changes towards more bureaucratic legislation. This expansion of tertiary legislation, in turn, raises questions on the levels of democratic legitimacy and the representation of interests in the European Union.
This contribution aims, first, to determine whether support for the far right is based on perceptions of cultural or economic threats posed by immigrants in 11 European countries. Second, it seeks to reanalyze the question of whether class is an important explanation for support for the far right using new measures of class and, related to this, to determine the extent to which class interacts with perceived threat to explain support for far-right parties. The study reveals that perceived cultural ethnic threats are a stronger predictor of far-right preferences than are perceived economic ethnic threats. This cultural versus economic distinction is also depicted in social class differences in far-right preference. These are particularly evident between sociocultural specialists and technocrats, as anticipated by the new social class scheme. Sociocultural specialists particularly perceive fewer cultural ethnic threats compared to technocrats and consequently have a smaller likelihood to prefer the far right. On the contextual level, the authors find that higher levels of GDP in a country result in greater far-right preference, whereas higher levels of GDP do result in lower levels of ethnic threats. The effect of proportion of Muslims on far-right preference is nonsignificant. The study shows that the choice of countries in cross-national research can heavily influence the results.
Unlike for the green party family, no empirically backed scholarly consensus exists about the grievances mobilized by populist right parties in Western Europe. To the contrary, three competing grievance mobilization models can be distinguished in the existing literature. These models focus on grievances arising from economic changes, political elitism and corruption, and immigration. This study discusses these three grievance mobilization models and tests them on comparable cross-sectional survey data for all seven relevant countries using multinomial probit analysis. The study finds that no populist right party performed well in elections around 2002 without mobilizing grievances over immigration. However, it finds several examples of populist right parties experiencing electoral success without mobilizing grievances over economic changes or political elitism and corruption. This study therefore solves a long-standing disagreement in the literature by comprehensively showing that only the appeal on the immigration issue unites all successful populist right parties.
A brief overview of the changing format and mechanics of national party systems suggests that the direct impact of European integration has been severely limited. Although the national party systems as constituted within the European electoral arena may show signs of such an impact, this has as yet failed to spill over into the strictly domestic arena. Two major reasons are suggested to account for this seeming imperviousness of the national party systems. First, the absence of an arena in which parties may compete at European level for executive office, an absence which thereby hinders the development of a European party system as such. Second, the misplaced division of competences associated with the national and European electoral arenas, whereby issues concerning the European political system itself are largely excluded from the national political arena to which they properly belong. The study concludes by suggesting that it is through the indirect process of depoliticisation that Europe may exert its greatest impact on national party systems.
Recently, several studies of Congress and the state legislatures have found evidence to support the information theory of legislative organization, that is, that legislatures develop committees whose characteristics reflect those of the parent body so as to acquire unbiased policy and political information. However, most of these studies have been conducted on the lower, larger legislative chambers. Senates, as smaller bodies that often follow the lead of legislation originating in their lower chambers, may have less need for unbiased information, perhaps allowing those bodies to develop more outlying, unrepresentative committees. We test this hypothesis in 42 state senates and find that unrepresentative committees also tend to be the exception in these upper chambers. Furthermore, as shown in previous studies of state house committees, the frequency of committee outliers in state senates appears to be idiosyncratic, with cultural, political, and institutional variables being unable to account for their observed patterns. While results support the information theory of legislative organization, evidence of outliers among party delegations on committees in these senates provides some support for the party-dominant theory.
Do attitudes towards European integration influence vote choice in national elections — a phenomenon I refer to as European Union (EU) issue voting? Evidence concerning EU issue voting is thus far mixed. Some scholars conclude that an electoral connection exists between European and national politics, whereas others claim that European integration has had very few observable effects on national elections. A resolution emerges when the conditional nature of EU issue voting is acknowledged. Specifically, EU issue voting is more likely to occur in elections in which both the extent of partisan conflict over European integration and the degree of EU issue salience among voters are high. Using a conditional logit model, I illustrate the conditional nature of EU issue voting by comparing UK, Danish, Dutch and German elections between 1992 and 2002.
This article re-examines and evaluates several hypotheses regarding the way national political parties position themselves with respect to European integration. By using a pooled cross-sectional panel of data on references to Europe in the election manifestos of political parties in 16 West European countries between 1970 and 2003, I present further evidence that their stances on European integration are largely determined by their ideology, here measured by the locations of the parties within party families and their general orientation along the left/right ideological continuum. However, notable changes have occurred and the influence of ideology has diminished, as most parties have adopted more favourable positions towards the European project over time. Nonetheless, it is too early to disregard the connection between left/right and pro/anti integration, since many marginal parties are still taking oppositional stances that are strongly related to their ideological commitment.
We restate and clarify the idea of the “cartel party,” a concept that has found considerable traction in studies of parties throughout the democratic world, including those far from the original research site and data on which the cartel model was based. The cartel party thesis holds that political parties increasingly function like cartels, employing the resources of the state to limit political competition and ensure their own electoral success. The thesis has been subject to varied empirical testing and to substantial theoretical evaluation and criticism. Against this background, we look again at the cartel party thesis in order to clarify ambiguities in and misinterpretations of the original argument. We also suggest further refinements, specifications and extensions of the argument. Following a background review of the original thesis, we break it down into its core components, and then clarify the terms in which it makes sense to speak of cartelization and collusion. We then go on to explore some of the implications of the thesis for our understanding of contemporary democracies and patterns of party organization and party competition and we identify a possible agenda for future research in party scholarship.
This article explains the positions taken by national political parties on the issue of European integration over the period 1984–96. Based on the theory of party systems developed by Lipset and Rokkan, we develop a cleavage account of party response to new political issues. We hypothesize that European integration is assimilated into pre-existing ideologies of party leaders, activists and constituencies that reflect long-standing commitments on fundamental domestic issues.
This article presents spatial models of three legislative procedures in the EC: the consultation, co-operation and assent procedures. The theory characterizes for each procedure the set of policies that can be adopted and the equilibrium EC policy as a function of the ideal policies of the countries, the Commission and the Parliament, and the location of the status quo. It yields comparative statements about EC policy and the institutions' powers under the three procedures, thus providing a framework for assessing arguments about the merits and demerits of existing EC institutions and proposals for institutional change.
The spatial maps of parties' policy programmes published by the Manifesto Research Group (MRG) for the European Consortium for Political Research reveal the following empirical patterns: that parties differentiate their policy positions from one another; that parties rarely leapfrog each other; that parties shift their positions over time but only within ‘ideologically delimited’ areas of the policy space. These findings are not well explained by existing spatial models of party competition, which typically predict policy convergence and which moreover do not examine temporal patterns of party policies. This article modifies the standard Downsian model to incorporate a concept originally developed by Chapman that, in addition to policies, voters are motivated by non-policy considerations arising from such factors as party leaders' images, social-psychological attachments rooted in class, religion, ethnicity and so on. For this ‘biased vote’ model I present illustrative arguments that vote-seeking parties are motivated to differentiate their policy positions from each other, and that over time they can be expected to vary their policy proposals but without leapfrogging – predictions that accord well with the MRG's empirical findings. I apply the biased vote model to empirical data on the distributions of voter preferences in recent British and French elections. My results support the illustrative arguments, and also suggest that these arguments apply even when the degree of voter bias in the electorate is quite low.
Much of the research on the European Community focuses on elites and institutions and as a result downplays the importance of the mass public in determining the direction of European integration. A common justification for this viewpoint is that members of the public provide a stable reservoir of strong support for European integration. Recent political events, however, raise doubts about this depiction of a ‘passive public’. Consequently, there is a need for a fuller understanding of European attitudes. We specify a number of hypotheses dealing with the effects of international trade interests, security concerns, and demographic characteristics on cross-national and cross-sectional variations in public support for European integration. Using Eurobarometer surveys and OECD data on EC trade from 1973–1989, we investigate these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional model. Our statistical results reveal that an individual's level of support is positively related to her nation's security and trade interests in EC membership and her personal potential to benefit from liberalized markets for goods, labour, and money.
Theories of issue evolution and issue manipulation suggest that ‘political losers’ in the party system can advance their position by introducing a new issue dimension. According to these theories, this strategy of issue entrepreneurship, i.e. the attempt to restructure political competition by mobilizing a previously non-salient issue dimension, allows political losers to attract new voters and reap electoral gains. In this study, we examine the extent to which these expectations hold by exploring issue entrepreneurial strategies by political parties when applied to the issue of European integration. Using multilevel modelling to analyse European Election Study data, we firstly show that voters are more likely to cast their ballot for parties which are losers on the extant dimension based on concerns related to European integration. Secondly, a time-series cross-sectional analysis demonstrates that parties which employ an issue entrepreneurial strategy are more successful electorally. In other words, voters are responsive to the issue entrepreneurial strategies of parties. These findings have important implications for our understanding of party competition and electoral behaviour in multiparty systems.
Scholars estimating policy positions from political texts typically code words or sentences and then build left-right policy scales based on the relative frequencies of text units coded into different categories. Here we reexamine such scales and propose a theoretically and linguistically superior alternative based on the logarithm of odds-ratios. We contrast this scale with the current approach of the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), showing that our proposed logit scale avoids widely acknowledged flaws in previous approaches. We validate the new scale using independent expert surveys. Using existing CMP data, we show how to estimate more distinct policy dimensions, for more years, than has been possible before, and make this dataset publicly available. Finally, we draw some conclusions about the future design of coding schemes for political texts.
As the European Union (EU) has evolved, the study agenda has shifted from ‘European integration’ to ‘EU politics’. Missing from this new agenda, however, is an understanding of the ‘cognitive constraints’ on actors and how actors respond, i.e. the shape of the EU ‘political space’ and the location of social groups and competition between actors within this space. The article develops a theoretical framework for understanding the shape of the EU political space (the interaction between an Integration–Independence and Left–Right dimension and the location of class and sectoral groups within this map), and tests this framework on the policy positions of the Socialist, Christian Democrat and Liberal party leaders between 1976 and 1994 (using the techniques of the ECPR Party Manifestos Group Project). The research finds that the two dimensions were salient across the whole period, explains why the party families converged on pro–European positions by the 1990s and discovers the emergence of a triangular ‘core’ of EU politics.
After six sets of European Parliament elections, do voters primarily use these elections to punish their national governments or to express their views on European issues? We answer this question by looking at all European elections (1979–2004) in all 25 EU states. We find that almost 40% of the volatility in party vote-shares in European elections compared to national elections is explained by the transfer of votes from large and governing parties to small and opposition parties. Nevertheless, anti-EU parties and green parties on average do better in European elections than in national elections. But these “European effects” are minor, and the position a party takes on Europe is largely irrelevant to its performance. Hence, despite the growing powers of the European Parliament, neither positions on matters regarding European integration, nor on matters regarding “normal” left-right policy, have much of an effect on electoral outcomes.
Most intergovernmentalist analyses of European integration focus on treaty bargaining among European Union member governments. Recent articles also have examined everyday decision making through power index analysis, an approach that asserts that a government's ability to influence policy is a function of all possible coalitions in the Council of Ministers to which it is pivotal. This approach suffers from two major weaknesses. First, it fails to take into account the policy preferences of governments; it overestimates the influence of governments holding extreme preferences and underestimates that of more centrist governments. Second, power index analysis fails to consider the important roles of the Commission of the European Communities and the European Parliament in legislative processes. Today's procedures affect the mix of agenda-setting and veto power, and this has systematic effects on policy outcomes. If intergovernmentalism is to explain choices made during treaty rounds, it must take into account these legislative dynamics.
Over the past three decades the effects of globalization and denationalization have created a division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in Western Europe. This study examines the transformation of party political systems in six countries (Austria, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK) using opinion surveys, as well as newly collected data on election campaigns. The authors argue that, as a result of structural transformations and the strategic repositioning of political parties, Europe has observed the emergence of a tripolar configuration of political power, comprising the left, the moderate right, and the new populist right. They suggest that, through an emphasis on cultural issues such as mass immigration and resistance to European integration, the traditional focus of political debate - the economy - has been downplayed or reinterpreted in terms of this new political cleavage. This new analysis of Western European politics will interest all students of European politics and political sociology.
Systematically revised and rewritten throughout and updated to cover the impact of the Lisbon Treaty, this highly-successful and ground-breaking text remains unique in analyzing the EU as a political system using the methods of comparative political science.
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