The EU Party System after Eastern Enlargement

Abstract

This paper investigates whether and how the process of Eastern enlargement of the European Union has altered the EU party system. This process has added representatives of some forty new parties to the previous structure. Comparing party placements on the two main dimensions of political contestation in the EU — the left–right dimension and integration–independence dimension — it is found that Eastern enlargement did surprisingly little to the format of the party system and the stature of its political groups, both regarding their distinctiveness and their cohesion.

Key Words:

• EU party system
• Eastern enlargement
• party competition
• ideological dimensions

Notes

1. See on multi‐level systems of governance, König, Rieger, and Schmitt (1996) or Hooghe and Marks (2001), for example.

2. This suggests that Estonian or Portuguese EP candidates — to name just two geographically distant member nationalities — must not be selected in Brussels by a central party authority. In fact, there are good normative democratic reasons (going back to the participation rights of local party members and supporters) why they should not be selected centrally but locally (e.g. Abendroth 1964).

3. See, for the following, Henig (1979), Hix and Lord (1997) and the web pages of the political groups of the EP.

4. The parties of Ireland, Britain and Denmark entered the European Parliament in 1973; those of Greece in 1981; Spanish and Portuguese parties entered in 1983; Austrian, Finnish and Swedish parties in 1996.

5. Examples are the green parties that emerged in many European countries in the 1980s (e.g. Müller‐Rommel 1989); or the parties of the second Italian republic from 1992 on (e.g. Mershon and Pasquino 1995).

6. See Mair and Mudde (1998) for a useful discussion of the somewhat unwieldy concept of ‘party family’.

7. With the accession of Romania and Bulgaria to the EU on 1 January 2007, extreme‐right representatives in the EP became numerous enough to form an own parliamentary group. This group dissolved again, however, in November 2007, due to internal splits.

8. See here also Sitter (2002) and Enyedi (2005), who highlight the impact of party (leader) strategy on party system stability and change.

9. See, for example, the special issue of Comparative Political Studies (35, no. 8) for an excellent sample of articles on the topic.

10. ‘Scepticism’ is the en vogue term, see Taggart and Szcerbiak (2008).

11. Some of the cited research pieces use complex factor analytical techniques, while others look at bivariate associations. Part of them is based on representative surveys of party voters and party elites, others use party programmes as a source of information, and still others rely on expert judgements on where the parties are (or were at some point in recent history) on a number of issue and ideological dimensions. Some of the survey‐based work uses broad summary indicators, while others analyse a multitude of subtle judgements (danger of non‐attitudes). All of these differences might have an impact on the findings.

12. Needless to say that this general statement applies in particular in periods of regime change, such as the breakdown of communism in the former Soviet Union and the members of the Warsaw Pact (see e.g. Evans and Whitefield 1998).

13. This is not to deny the possibility of distinguishing a more economic from a more cultural sub‐dimension in the overarching left–right dimension. They both contribute — perhaps together with other meaning elements — to the overall meaning of left and right in a given environment.

14. The question wording goes as follows: ‘In political matters people talk of “the left” and “the right”. What is your position? Please indicate your views using any number on a 10‐point‐scale. On this scale, where 1 means “left” and 10 means “right”, which number best describes your position? … And about where would you place the following parties on this scale? How about the Labour Party? And …’ Note that in the Swedish study an eleven‐point scale (from 0 to 10) was used. We tried to adjust the different scale format by collapsing scale categories ‘0’ and ‘1’ into scale category ‘1’. The Belgian survey did not ask this question which is why Belgian parties cannot be considered in this analysis.

15. The question wording goes as follows: ‘Some say European unification should be pushed further. Others say it already has gone too far. What is your opinion? Please indicate your views using any number on a 10‐point‐scale. On this scale, 1 means unification “has already gone too far” and 10 means it “should be pushed further”. What number on this scale best describes your position? … And about where would you place the following parties on this scale? How about the Labour Party? And …’ Note that Swedish respondents were asked a different but equivalent question: whether they agree with or oppose Sweden’s EU membership, and where they locate the Swedish parties on this scale. Here, again, the Swedish study used an eleven‐point scale, which we have tried to adjust as described in the previous footnote.

16. Van der Brug and van der Eijk (1999) have shown that voters’ perceptions of party locations are relatively accurate as long as general policy and, in particular, ideological dimensions are concerned. We believe that both the EU dimension and the left–right dimension that are analysed here are of such a general nature and that party positions can be estimated reliably on the basis of representative mass surveys.

17. This frame code identifies to which level of governance a particular argument refers: national, EU or unspecific?

18. The Chappell Hill expert survey used the following question: ‘First, we would like you to classify the parties in terms of their broad ideology. On the scale below, 0 indicates that a party is at the extreme left of the ideological spectrum, 10 indicates that it is at the extreme right, and 5 means that it is at the center. For each party, please circle the ideological position that best describes a party’s overall ideology’.

19. The Chappell Hill expert survey asked: ‘First, how would you describe the general position on European integration that the party’s leadership has taken over the course of 2002? For each party row, please circle the number that corresponds best to your view. Circle only one number’. A seven‐point answering scale was provided, with the categories strongly opposed, opposed, somewhat opposed, neutral, somewhat in favour, in favour, and strongly in favour.

20. In order to be able to compare directly the findings from three different datasets, the original variables were z‐transformed.

21. Note that some of the variation in EP group positions is certainly caused by the fact that the three methods analyse not fully identical samples of EP member parties, that is to say that some parties covered by the voter survey could not be studied in the Euromanifesto analysis, etc.