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ABSTRACT
This article investigates the influence of the two major “Europarties” – the European People’s Party and Party of European Socialists – on their Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovak partner parties from 1989 to 2012. Two research questions are examined: (1) In which way do Europarties influence their Central and Eastern European (CEE) partners?; and (2) What is the precise result of Europarty influence? These questions are answered by drawing on qualitative content analysis of 38 semi-structured interviews. The main finding is that due to strong Europarty influence, the CEE parties became more similar to the established West European parties regarding their strategic behaviour, programme, and intra-party democracy.
Acknowledgements
I thank Jan W. van Deth and Thomas Poguntke who provided fundamental insight and expertise that greatly improved this article. I am also immensely grateful to all my colleagues at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) and the Heinrich-Heine-University of Düsseldorf for their comments on earlier versions of the manuscript.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Benjamin von dem Berge is a researcher and consultant for research funding at the Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen. Previously, he was a lecturer at the Department of Political Science at the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf and a researcher and PhD Candidate at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim. The main focus of his research is on political parties and party systems, democratisation, European integration, and comparative politics.
Notes
* Research for this article was conducted at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research, University of Mannheim, and the Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf.
1 The term “CEE countries” refers to the 10 countries from this region which joined the EU in 2004 and 2007.
2 “CEE partner parties” are defined as all CEE parties which were at least at one point in time officially connected to a Europarty, at least as an “observer party”.
3 A “European party family” consists of three “components” (Poguntke and Pütz Citation2006, 334f.): (1) national parties, (2) group in the European Parliament (EP), and (3) (extra-parliamentary) Europarty.
4 Traditionally, the term “(Top-Down-)Europeanisation” is used to describe influences of the European level on actors, structures, and processes on the national level, regardless of whether the “national level” is located in Western Europe or in CEE. In fact, what happens in CEE by the influence of the European level is not only a “Europeanisation” on the national level but rather a “Westeuropeanisation” (e.g. Beichelt Citation2003, 257). Therefore, it can be argued that in CEE the term “Westeuropeanisation” is more precise than the term “Europeanisation”.
5 The timespan from 1989 to 2012 was chosen as the period of investigation, because it constitutes the entire period of cooperation between Europarties and CEE partner parties from its start until the data collection of this study. Thus, it is possible to investigate whether “time” played a role in the process of Europarty influence or not.
6 The theoretical considerations presented in this section follow von dem Berge and Poguntke (Citation2013). For further details on the mechanisms and theoretical considerations behind the hypotheses presented in this article, please see von dem Berge and Poguntke (Citation2013).
7 In the following, simply called “Christian Democratic family”.
8 In case of the EPP, also the role of the EUCD (European Union of Christian Democrats) has to be considered. Already in 1989, the EUCD accomplished the search for new member parties in CEE on behalf of the EPP (e.g. von Gehlen Citation2005, 121; Mittag and Steuwer Citation2010, 136). Therefore, EUCD influence is conceptualised as EPP influence.
9 See footnote 2.
10 Regarding conditionality, it is important that besides the “official/formal” accession criteria (for example, the acceptance of the norms and values of the Europarties), there were also “unofficial/informal” criteria the CEE partners had to fulfil when joining both Europarties. The formal criteria were established by the EUCD in 1990, by the EPP in 1996 and by the PES in 2002. Before this, only informal criteria were applied.
11 For technical reasons, not all categories are “codable”, only the ones on the lowest levels (see Appendix 3). In order to collect as much information as possible in the coding process, a very detailed coding scheme with 109 “codable” categories was developed. This enables further research to test more detailed hypotheses on lower levels of abstraction compared to this article. In the article at hand, the formulated hypotheses regarding general aspects of Europarty influence on CEE partner parties require information on a rather high level of abstraction (this becomes apparent when checking the levels of the categories used for the analyses which are listed below the various tables in the empirical section of this article). The data set allows for aggregating the coding frequencies on the different levels of the coding scheme – depending on the level of aggregation the researcher needs for testing his or her hypotheses.
12 It could be argued that, for reliability reasons, more than one person should do the coding. However, in the literature, it is stated that, in case of complex qualitative content analyses, the researcher himself or herself should code and not trained coders as in many quantitative content analysis, because in these cases, only the researcher possesses the competence necessary for interpreting the interviews, which comprises the detailed knowledge about the research questions, the theoretical model and the deeper meaning of the categories (Kuckartz Citation2012, 48f.). In the present case, the latter argument is more important because of the complexity of the coding scheme and the theoretical model. Therefore, the best data quality can be achieved when the researcher is solely responsible for coding. The strictly deductive approach that was used to develop the coding scheme and the interview guides ensures that the results are not driven by the scholars who have constructed the interview guides and coding scheme (see previous section).
13 The MAXQDA-file is archived at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES) at the University of Mannheim.
14 In both party families, other Western actors were also partially involved in the process of Europarty Eastern enlargement: national parties from Western Europe, EP-groups, and political foundations (von dem Berge Citation2015, 72–88). With their activities in CEE, they supported and assisted the Europarties in the process of their Eastern enlargement (von dem Berge Citation2015). Influences of these actors on CEE parties were only considered when they worked together with the Europarties. Accordingly, in the interview questions, “Europarty” influence was specifically queried. When the interviewees referred in their answers to these clearly “Europarty-related” questions to one of the other West European actors, then this was coded as “Europarty influence” because in these cases, they obviously worked closely together with the Europarty.
15 Furthermore, not least based on the logic of the “salience theory” (see, for example, Budge et al. Citation2001), one can argue that the more often an interviewee (or the interviewees in general) mentions a statement, the greater its importance for the interviewee (or the interviewees in general).
16 Of course, it is important that interviews are standardised to large extent (the same number of questions and the same phrasing of questions).
17 See footnote 10. The criteria mainly aimed at the party system dimension and the policy dimension.
18 Attempts to hamper alliances and coalitions are not considered in because this would bias the results of testing Hypothesis H2a.
19 Party system dimension: “alliances”, “coalitions”, and “fusions”. Policy dimension: “soft forms”, “hard forms”, and “general”.
20 In their statements about the strength of Europarty influence, Europarty representatives have very often not distinguished among the three different party systems. They provided rather general information about the strength of Europarty influence in all selected CEE party systems.