EU Integration under Highly Fractionalised Party Systems: The Cases of Poland and the Czech Republic

Abstract

It is widely argued that the pre-accession process of the Eastern enlargement affected political competition in Central and Eastern Europe. While such claims have been substantiated in general theoretical propositions, there is a lack of theoretically informed research attempting to explain how political competition was affected throughout the region. This article utilises Lijphart’s institutional typology to better understand how pre-accession processes shaped political competition under consensus democracies. The article shows that the consensually designed democracies of Poland and the Czech Republic were able to mitigate the negative impact of the pre-accession process through the rise of Eurosceptic parties.

Notes

¹ Although ‘Europeanisation’ as a concept has been difficult to define, in its most basic form Europeanisation refers to the extent to which EU membership affects institutions, policies, and norms of EU member states. In other words, Europeanisation refers to the harmonisation of domestic institutions, policies, and norms with those at the EU level (Radaelli 2003).

² Lijphart’s (1999) seminal work Patterns of Democracy shows that modern democratic systems are divided into two categories—consensual and majoritarian. Based on this categorisation, Lijphart argues that under consensual democracies political competition tends to be more robust due to the higher number of effective parties.

³ It is worth pointing out that the effective number of parties variable from Table 1 represents an average for all parliamentary elections held between 1990 and 2005. In the case of Poland, the effective number of parties of 5.11 is highly influenced by the 1991 elections, which resulted in 10.86 effective parties. In other words, if we were to exclude the 1991 elections from our analysis, the effective number of parties average would be slightly lower as the 1993, 1997, and 2001 elections produced 3.88, 2.95, and 3.60 effective parties respectively.

⁴ The only party to be categorised as Eurosceptic in Bulgaria was the far-right and nationalistic Ataka, which was founded in 2005 and entered parliament only after the conclusion of accession negotiations. In Romania, the Greater Romania Party (Partidul România Mare—PRM) was never invited into a governing coalition and lost its coalition appeal due to its Eurosceptic attitudes, which were eventually toned down. Hungary represents something of an anomaly in this context, as one of its major parties—FIDESZ—was categorised as Eurosceptic during the pre-accession period by Taggart and Szczerbiak (2002). However, according to a number of other assessments, FIDESZ was rather one of the more Euro-enthusiastic parties in Hungary (Kopecky & Mudde 2002; Enyedi 2006). For an overview on the impact of European integration in the respective CEE party systems see Lewis and Mansfeldová (2006).

⁵ Morlino (2012) defines as qualities of democracy the following eight features: rule of law; electoral accountability; inter-institutional accountability; participation; competition; freedoms; equality; and responsiveness.

⁶ Absorptive change occurs in the form of low domestic change and consists of incorporating European policies or ideas into existing laws and norms. Accommodative change results in medium domestic change and consists of accommodating European policies and ideas by ‘patching up’ existing policies and norms. Transformative change, finally, results in the highest degree of domestic change by replacing existing policies or norms with European ones.

⁷ For more on the normative aspects of Euroscepticism, see Crespy and Verschueren (2009).

⁸ ‘Stanowis ko w sprawie przysnipienia do Unii E uropejskiej’, Samoobrona, 2001, available at: www.samoobrona.org.pl, accessed 27 September 2016. See also Szczerbiak (2004, p. 259).

⁹ ‘Manifest českèho eurorealismu’, Občanská Demokratická Strana, 2002, available at: https://www.ods.cz/docs/dokumenty/zahradil-manifest.pdf, accessed 27 September 2016.

¹⁰ In 1997, 22% of KSČM supporters were in favour of EU membership. This number had been reduced to 12% by 2002. It is also worth highlighting that KSČM had become more Eurosceptic over the years: out of all references to the EU in the KSČM programme, 69% were negative in 2002, compared to 47% in 1998 (Linek & Mansfeldova 2006, pp. 26–7).

¹¹ Kostadinova (2002, pp. 30–1) was able to show that the effective threshold has had the impact of reducing party system fragmentation in Eastern Europe for the period of 1989–2000.

¹² For an analysis on the effects of electoral formulas on proportionality, see Gallagher (1991).