The Europeanization of Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe? The Impact of EU Entry on Issue Stances, Salience and Programmatic Coherence

Abstract

The completion of the two-wave entry of CEE states in the EU potentially changes the impact of European integration issues on party politics in the region. Membership entails movement from a general aspiration to ‘return to Europe’ to hard costs and specific policy instruments. But are these changes reflected in the Europe-relevant issue stances taken by parties and in the importance parties assign to them in their electoral appeals? Has the relationship of European and integration issues to the broader issue bases of party competition changed? Data from expert surveys of political parties in the ten new CEE member states conducted just before and just after accession reveal that, in line with expectations from comparative literature on party competition, entry has had little impact on party stances but greater impact on the salience of integration issues.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Data for the expert survey used in this paper were obtained with a grant from the Nuffield Foundation project, ‘Political Mobilization and Elite Framing in Generating Support for Supra-National Institutions and European Union Enlargement in Post-Communist Eastern Europe’ and the European Commission FP6 funded project ‘Social Inequality and Why It Matters for the Economic and Political Development of Europe and Its Citizens: Post-Communist Central and Eastern Europe in Comparative Perspective’ (EUREQUAL). We are grateful for the comments of participants of the CEELBAS conference, ‘Beyond Europeanization: The (Non)-impact of the EU on Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe’ where a first draft was presented, to Tim Haughton for his excellent editorship of this special issue, and to Ron Hill for clarifying our often jargony and imprecise prose. Thanks also to Matt Loveless, Benito Miron and Piero Tortola for their valuable research assistance.

Notes

Stephen Whitefield and Robert Rohrschneider, ‘Consistent Choice Sets? The Stances of Political Parties towards European Integration in 10 Central East European Democracies, 2003–2007’, European Journal of Public Policy, Vol. 17 (2010) forthcoming.

Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield, ‘Understanding Divisions in Party Systems: Issue Position and Issue Salience in 13 Post-Communist Democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol.42, No.2 (2009), pp.280–313.

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Robert Rohrschneider and Stephen Whitefield, ‘Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration in Post-Communist Countries: The State of the Art’, European Union Politics, Vol.7, No.1 (2006), pp.141–60.

Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Formation of Party Cleavages in Post-Communist Democracies’, Party Politics, Vol.1, No.4 (1995), pp.447–72.

Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, ‘Cleavage Structures, Party Systems, and Voter Alignments: An Introduction’, in Seymour M. Lipset and Stein Rokkan (eds.), Party Systems and Voter Alignments (New York: Free Press, 1967), pp.1–64.

Rohrschneider and Whitefield, ‘Consistent Choice Sets?’; and Stephen Whitefield and Robert Rohrschneider, ‘Representational Consistency: Stability and Change in Political Cleavages in Central and Eastern Europe’, Politics and Policy, Vol. 37, No. 5 (2009), pp. 667–90.

James Adams, Michael Clark, Lawrence Ezrow and Garrett Glasgow, ‘Understanding Change and Stability in Party Ideologies: Do Parties Respond to Public Opinion or to Past Election Results?’, British Journal of Political Science, Vol.34, No.4 (2004), pp.589–610.

Ian Budge and Dennis J. Fairlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections: Issue Effects and Party Strategies in Twenty-Three Democracies (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1983).

David Robertson, A Theory of Party Competition (London: Wiley, 1976); Christoffer Green-Pederson, ‘The Growing Importance of Issue Competition: The Changing Nature of Party Competition in Western Europe’, Political Studies, Vol.55, No.4 (2007), pp.607–28.

John R. Petrocik, ‘Issue Ownership in Presidential Elections, With a 1980 Case Study’, American Journal of Political Science, Vol.40, No.3 (1996), pp.825–50.

Budge and Fairlie, Explaining and Predicting Elections, p.40.

The first survey achieved a response rate of about 42 per cent if all initial contacts with experts, including those with multiple e-mail addresses, are included in this calculation. More realistically, if we exclude respondents who never responded to our initial e-mail, we obtain a rate of about 72 per cent. The second survey even achieved a slightly higher response rate of 52 and 73 per cent, respectively.

Stephen Whitefield, Milada Anna Vachudova, Marco R. Steenbergen, Robert Rohrschneider, Gary Marks, Matthew P. Loveless and Liesbet Hooghe, ‘Do Expert Surveys Produce Consistent Estimates of Party Stances on European Integration? Comparing Expert Surveys in the Difficult Case of Central and Eastern Europe’, Electoral Studies, Vol.26, No.1 (2007), pp.50–61.

Gary Marks, Liesbert Hooghe, Monica Nelso and Erica Edwards, ‘Party Competition and European Integration in East and West: Different Structure, Same Causality’, Comparative Political Studies, Vol.39, No.2 (2006), pp.155–75.

Whitefield et al., ‘Do Expert Surveys Produce Consistent Estimates’.

The correlation between two variables reflects the degree to which the variables are related.

By integration instruments we mean the introduction of, and experience with, specific policies that reflect actual costs and benefits of EU entry.

See Szczerbiak and Bil's contribution to this collection.

We rule out one possible methodological explanation for the apparent greater instability of salience over positional indicators, namely that expert respondents find it more difficult to judge salience than party stances. A comparison of the standard deviations of individual-level responses to questions regarding position and salience, however, shows only one paired comparison of position and salience with a difference in standard deviation of more than 0.2 on a 7-point scale. This was for views of the communist legacy (difference in std = 0.43), but notably the standard deviation was lower not higher for the salience measure (std = 1.26) than for position (std = 1.69). Overall for the indicators used in the paper, no std was higher than 1.69.

Cronbach's alpha measures how well a set of items (or variables) measures a single unidimensional latent construct.

We adopt a cautious approach in interpreting this evidence. Additional confirmatory factor analysis that includes the general integration items and domestic cleavages suggests little statistical improvement in fit for the two-dimensional over the one-dimensional solution for issue position. The same does not hold for similar analysis of salience (see below; also Whitefield and Rohrschneider, ‘Stability and Change in Political Cleavages in Central and Eastern Europe’).

Given the high correlation of ‘distributional issues’ with ‘state versus market economy’, these items are combined in this analysis. The scale for general integration includes ‘general integration with the West’, ‘EU political unity’ and ‘market integration’. The scale for specific integration instruments includes ‘inter-governmentalism versus federalism’, ‘foreign ownership of land’, ‘foreign ownership of industry’ and ‘migration of people’. The model also includes a control for level of a party's electoral support and country dummies.

See the other contributions to this volume.

Cf. Whitefield and Rohrschneider, ‘Stability and Change in Political Cleavages in Central and Eastern Europe’.

Our findings here are very much in line with other contributions to this collection.

Rohrschneider and Whitefield, ‘Consistent Choice Sets?’; Rohrschneider and Whitefield, ‘Understanding Divisions in Party Systems’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Whitefield

Stephen Whitefield is a Professor of Politics at Oxford University and Fellow in Politics at Pembroke College. His current research interests focus on Russian and more broadly post-communist comparative politics and societies, especially social inequality and its political consequences, and on European party competition.

Robert Rohrschneider

Robert Rohrschneider is the Sir Robert Worcester Distinguished Professor in Public Opinion and Survey Research in the Department of Political Science at Kansas University in Lawrence, KS. His current research interests focus on public support for European integration and how European parties frame salient issues in domestic debates. He spent the academic year 2008–9 as a research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, Wassenaar.