1 Classe accademica di Scienze Sociali
Settore di Scienze Politiche
A.A 2019/20
Between Europeanisation and Politicisation: party politics in the multi-level European political system before and after the poly-crisis
Candidato: Thomas Romano
Relatore: Dott. Edoardo Bressanelli
3
Index
Introduction ... 4
1. From Europeanisation to politicisation: the evolution of a theoretical approach... 7
1.1 Europeanisation, what’s in the concept ... 7
1.2 Europeanisation of parties and party systems ... 11
1.3 Europeanisation of individual parties (parties as organisations) ... 16
1.4 Indirect Europeanisation, from Europeanisation to politicisation ... 17
1.5 Politicisation as an example of Europe’s transformative impact? ... 21
2. Analytical and methodological approaches to party Europeanisation ... 24
2.1 Research designs and the challenge of party Europeanisation ... 24
2.2 Case selection ... 26
2.3 Metholodogies ... 28
2.4 Towards analytical variety: good or bad? ... 31
3.Europeanisation and politicisation in European studies: arenas for future research ... 34
3.1 Differentiation as an example of indirect Europeanisation? ... 35
3.2 Direct Europeanisation and the rise of illiberalism ... 38
3.3 Europeanisation and politicisation in an era of disintegration ... 40
Conclusion... 42
4
Introduction
The aim of this work is to offer a comprehensive account of the academic debate on the transformative impact of European integration on parties and party systems. This topic has featured prominently in the academic debate, involving scholars from the fields of comparative politics, EU integration theory and related political science field in the last 25 years. Moreover, it is also a matter for increasing public debate. Europe is increasingly contested in the domestic political arena of member States: this is, partly, a consequence of the increasing intervention of the EU in the domestic politics of member States, especially after the Eurocrisis and the economic interventions which followed. However, party systems were also affected by secessionist tendencies within the EU, of which Brexit is the clearest example (Hobolt 2016).
The topic has been approached in different ways, not always interconnected. One prominent field has considered the possible emergence and development of parties at the European level (Hix and Lord 1997, Bardi 1994). In this case, research questions were mainly investigating the role of national parties in forming a party system at the supranational level. In some other cases, research did not investigate the interplay between the national and supranational systems: this is particularly the case for the mushrooming literature on Euroscepticism and opposition to the EU among national political systems (Taggart 1998, Kopecky and Mudde 2002, Leconte 2010, de Vries 2018). This work is, however, centred upon a third research field: that is, the interplay between supranational integration and party (system) change at the national level. The interest here is on the mechanisms that causes supranational integration to affect party change at the national level: how does European integration shape party systems? Do parties as organisations change as a result of their integration into supranational arenas of decision-making? How do parties at the national level take advantage of the political opportunities which arise from European integration?
In order to assess how scholars have answered to these questions, this work broadly takes into account two different approaches to understand the interplay between European integration and party change. A first approach uses the conceptual framework of Europeanisation, a concept which has been applied most notoriously to understand the transformative impact of Europe in the public policy field
5 (Featherstone and Radaelli 2003, Graziano and Vink 2007). In this case, the approach can be understood as a strictly ‘top-down’ one, since the interest is on how parties adapt to the top-down pressure which results from European integration. It will be seen that adapting the concept to political parties rather than public policies came with additional challenges, and that scholars had to refine their conceptualisation of the transformative impact of Europe on parties.
To this effect, a second concept comes into play, namely, politicisation. In this case, the focus in on how parties are affected by, and take advantage of, ‘the increasing scope of political conflict over European integration at the national level’ (Hutter et al. 2016). It will be seen that, in this case, the interplay between European integration and parties is less straightforward than a simple ‘top-down’ mechanism: while there is an effect of supranational integration, since politicisation is (also) a reaction to specific integration moments, politicisation mainly originates at the domestic level: to this effect, it is also necessary to understand how parties have dealt with the pressures coming from their public opinion.
Within this theoretical framework, this work aims to five an answer to three broad set of questions: the first of these concerns how have the concepts of
Europeanisation and politicisation conceptualised the impact of ‘Europe’ on parties and party systems. Are they two completely separate fields? Is it possible to
detect some common findings? Have they been answering to the same type of research questions? The second questions is focused on the analytical and methodological side of this topic. It asks to what extent analytical and
methodological approaches have evolved by following a common path or differentiating. Research on party positions on the EU have used a variety of
methods, and it is relevant for the purposes of this work to understand, in particular, their appropriateness in answering the general theoretical problems of the field. Finally, the work aims to assess how the concept of politicisation can address some
of the present and future challenges of the EU, including growing autocratisation
within some of its member States as well as future scenarios for EU reform, such as differentiation. More in general, the general goal of this work is to understand how politicisation can shape future steps of EU integration.
Accordingly, the work will be structured in three parts: in the first chapter, it will recall the theoretical debate focusing on party Europeanisation and politicisation,
6 considering in particular how the theoretical approach has evolved in analysing the impact of European integration on party politics at the domestic level. In the second chapter, the focus will shift on the analytical and methodological approaches to the topic, trying to understand, in particular, how different research designs and methods have been used to tackle the specific research problems of the field. Finally, the work will shift on future perspectives on the concept of politicisation and, generally, of the increasingly relevant connection between domestic party politics and future steps of European integration.
7
1. From Europeanisation to politicisation: the evolution of a
theoretical approach
1.1 Europeanisation, what’s in the concept
The concept of Europeanisation finds its origin in different trends in the studies of EU integration, and European politics more in general, around the 1990s. Firstly, a shift from macro to meso-analysis in the studying of the European Union. Previous studies on European integration had been focused on explaining the rationale for economic and political integration between sovereign states, treating European integration as a dependent variable. While these approaches, exemplified by the classic dichotomy of neo-functionalism between intergovernmentalism, had offered important insights over the process of European integration, they were limited in conceptualising the opposite process, that is, of analysis changes in domestic political systems resulting from European integration.
Around the 1990s, EU scholars had started focusing on domestic political systems for both a theoretical and historical-contextual reason. Theoretically, Europeanisation as a concept clearly derives from the ‘erosion of disciplinary boundaries’ (Jupille and Caporaso 1999) between IR and comparative politics in the study of European integration. Since the 1980s, the ‘rediscovery of institutions’ in political science, initiated by the seminal study by March and Olsen (1984), had marked a shift also in EU studies, where more and more scholars were using tools developed in comparative politics to conceptualise European integration, such as Scharpf’s (1988) seminal study on the ‘joint-decision trap’ in decision-making within the EU polity. This was as much an ontological as an epistemological shift: the EU was not only starting to be characterised as a fully-fledged political system rather than just an international organisation, but research was also starting to focus on the day-to-day functioning of the EU rather than explaining how integration proceeded.
Moreover, historically, the Maastricht Treaty had marked a watershed in the development of the European Union, starting the process of political integration. As a result, there was a need to find a theoretical approach that could help
8 conceptualise the transformative impact of European integration in the policy areas which had come under the European field of competence. Secondly, mass politics started to come into play as an intervening variable in European integration: for the first time, the ‘permissive consensus’ (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970) of masses to European integration seemed no longer to hold, as several referendums held in different European countries over the Maastricht treaty – or, in some cases, on EU membership itself - had shown a significant opposition to EU integration among voters. Hence, domestic politics was entering the realm of EU studies not just as an intervening factor, but rather as the arena where the kind of political change driven by EU integration was to become more and more visible.
In one of the first mentions of Europeanisation in an academic work, Ladrech (1994) considered precisely the transformations induced by the Maastricht Treaty in France, especially pointing out how the principles of subsidiarity and regionalisation affected its traditional centralistic style of governance. In this work, Ladrech defined Europeanisation as an ‘incremental process reorienting the direction and shape of politics to the degree that EC political and economic dynamics become part of the organizational logic of national politics and policy-making’ (p.69). The novelty of this approach was precisely in the centrality of the national political space as the arena in which political change resulting from European integration happened. Moreover, Ladrech stressed that Europeanisation affected both the authority of national political actors as well as their legitimacy, highlighting how changes in relations and power at the national level went together with potential new political conflicts. In other words, this was already an introduction of the potential of Europeanisation to alter political struggle among parties or other political actors, although this remained implicit in his definition. On the other hand, Ladrech’s definition already contained some of the challenges that Europeanisation scholars had to face when considering this concept. Firstly, his definition remained very abstract: he did not highlight how political change was supposed to happen, nor he clearly delimitated processes taking place at the supranational or national levels. Rather than giving a precise definition of the process itself, his definition of Europeanisation remained rather descriptive.
In the introduction of a first comparative volume on Europeanisation, Hix and Goetz (2000) addressed some of the challenges of the concept. While starting from
9 the same central claim as Ladrech’s - that is, that domestic politics ought to be the dependent variable rather than a simple intervening factor of the European integration process – they went some way further in establishing the link between supranational and national processes. Hix and Goetz specified that European integration had a double effect on domestic politics: first, the supranational delegation of policy competences altered domestic policy choices. Secondly, the domestic ‘opportunity structure’ changed: political actors exploit opportunities arising from European integration to avoid domestic constraints, or to secure informational advantages (Hix and Goetz 2000, p.10). This elements highlights the key role of political actors as policy entrepreneurs, which can strategically exploit the opportunities arising from Europeanisation, moving the definition away from an institution-centred focused and introducing the role of political actors as key to explain the process of political change.
The tension between actor and institution-centred explanation was crucial in the development of competing approaches to Europeanisation. As anticipated, the debate was firmly rooted in neo-institutionalist approaches to European integration, and the dialogue between rationalist and sociological approaches (Hall and Taylor 1996) was also prominent in Europeanisation studies. A typical rationalist approach could be found in the definition put forward by Claudio Radaelli (2000, 2003), arguably the most popular and widely used also by subsequent literature. Radaelli drew largely on Ladrech’s definition, but avoided mentioning organisational change in order to account for a broader definition of political change. Accordingly, his definition conceptualised Europeanisation as:
Processes of (a) construction, (b) diffusion and (c) institutionalization of formal and informal rules, procedure, policy paradigms, styles, ‘ways of doing things’, and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the making of EU public policy and politics and then incorporated in the logic of domestic discourse, identities, political structures and public policies.
(Radaelli 2003)
This definition had the merit to include both the supranational and national levels in the definition of the process. While Europeanisation happens at the national level, the supranational level is the arena where the specific source of change develops. Moreover, Radaelli’s definition was abstract enough to include both organisational change and the role of political actors, since it left the door open to different methods of ‘incorporation’ in the national arena. As he stated, this approach is
10 bottom-up, in that it gives centrality to processes happening at the national political level to detect policy change. The ‘bottom-up’ approach has the merit of avoiding an overestimation of the impact of Europeanisation, since it also takes into consideration other contextual variables at the national level that may have induced the specific effect under investigation. The biggest merit in Radaelli’s definition is precisely that the concept of Europeanisation is clearly delimited, and he makes it clear that the concept does not equate with political integration. As a matter of fact, Europeanisation is ‘post-ontological, being concerned with what happens once EU institutions are in place and produce their effects’ (Radaelli 2003, p.33). For a somewhat similar reason, Europeanisation is not convergence, since it is conceptualised as a process: the analysis of its specific effects are left out by the definition, and in any case they were crucially mediated by domestic political factors.
Radaelli’s definition of Europeanisation, while not limited in substance to public policy, had its most evident application in this field. Being himself a public policy scholar, Radaelli was rather vague on what kind of change is expected on the politics dimension, making only limited reference to ‘cognitive and normative structures’ which’ may trigger transformative effects on all the elements of politics and policy’ (Radaelli 2003, p.36). In a competing definition of Europeanisation, Cowles, Caporaso and Risse conceptualised this process as the
‘emergence and the development at the European level of distinct structures of governance, that is, of political, legal and social institutions associated with political problem solving that formalizes interactions among the actors, and of policy networks specializing in the creation of authoritative European rules’ (Cowles et al. 2001, p.3).
On a first account, this definition is even less appliable to party systems than Radaelli’s, since its ‘top-down’ approach is evident: change takes place at the European level and is then ‘downstreamed’ into the national political arena. In a subsequent article, Borzel and Risse (2000) specify that they consider Europeanisation precisely as a top-down political process. However, the key takeaway from Borzel and Risse’s account of Europeanisation is their analysis of the intervening variables in Europeanisation. They maintain that the process is triggered by an ‘institutional misfit’: there must be a diversity between supranational and national political institutions creating an adaptational pressure and stimulating domestic change. In this process, the role of political actors is
11 crucial, since they act as policy entrepreneurs either resisting political change or actively stimulating it1. In this account, political actors hold the keys of the game, since their mediation of the adaptational pressure coming from the European level is central in determining both the characteristics and the outcome of Europeanisation.
Borzel and Risse’s model of Europeanisation finds its limitation in the strict top-down approach that they use as well as in their rather deterministic expectations: their proposition that Europeanisation derives from an ‘institutional misfit’ calls for the logical resolution of resolving that misfit at the national level. However, their main contribution was to have outlined the role that inertia and resistance to the adaptive pressure of the European level play in determining political change. Summing up, it is fair to conceptualise Europeanisation as a process of political change happening in a multi-level system, where the source of change is located at the EU level, but its incorporation and effects at the national level is crucially mediated by the role of political actors acting as policy entrepreneurs. Moreover, the kind of adaptive pressure brought by Europeanisation can result in resistance or inertia at the national level.
1.2 Europeanisation of parties and party systems
Europeanisation as a concept was not immediately applied to political parties. As a matter of fact, the ‘politics’ dimension was not immediately considered as an object of Europeanisation, as was the policy dimension (Hix and Goetz 2000). Clearly, this was in large part due to the absence of a direct source of adaptive pressure at the European level. There was, in fact, no uniformity of ‘formal and informal rules’ forming at the European level.
It is fair to say that party Europeanisation came as the result of two different approaches. The first approach developed from the growing amount of public opinion and electoral studies in the 1990s, focusing on European integration and public opinion in Western Europe (van der Ejik et al. 1996, Evans 1999). The key takeaway from those studies was that, generally, public opinion in Western
1 Borzel and Risse make a distinction between a rationalist and sociological account of the intervening role of political
actors: while in a rationalist perspective they act as veto players, in a sociological perspective the role of ‘norm entrepreneurs’ is key to stimulate domestic change
12 European democracies was increasingly likely not only to be divided on European integration, but also to mobilise that division in national elections. This had the potential to challenge the traditional approach which saw European elections as ‘second-order’, in the sense that they were mostly fought on national political issues and used by voters to support or punish governing parties based on national political considerations (Reif and Schmitt 1980). This was first evident in some of the referendums held in the early ‘90s on the Maastricht treaty. In particular, some Danish authors, focusing on the referendums held in Denmark on the approval of the Maastricht Treaty, had insinuated that voters could have been driven, for the first time, by something different than mere ‘second-order’ considerations, and that the first rejection of the Maastricht treaty indicated, in fact, attitudes towards supranational political integration cross-cutting traditional political allegiances (Siune and Svensson 1993). National politics therefore increasingly became a focus of research by scholars, challenging the second-order election model.
In effect, it was found that in national elections, EU issues were starting to gain prominence. The clearer example of this is the study by Evans (1999) on the EU issue in the British general election of 1997. The key findings by Evans were that, firstly, British citizen’s position on the EU were not related to their partisan allegiance, and secondly, that attitudes towards EU integration affected voting behaviour regardless of left-right positioning. In a later study, Gabel (2000) confirmed that this also held for several other western European countries.
In sum, the general status of the ‘politics’ dimension of Europeanisation was that a new pro/anti-European integration divide was starting to form and to affect the domestic political arena: this happened more clearly in referendums held over European integration, which for the first time had shown a consistent form of opposition towards European integration, but also in national political elections, when in some cases a pro-European position had been an important electoral asset, as in the case of the UK Labour party in 1997. This cleavage was conceptualised in different ways, with some considering the pro-anti integration divide to cut cross the more classic left-right distinction (Hix and Lord 1997, Hix 1999), while others (Hooghe and Marks 1999) considered them to be more closely related. It was not clear, however, how parties reacted to this special kind of adaptive pressure, and
13 what kind of change could affect the ‘supply side’ in the electoral arena. In other words, how were parties reacting to the increasing salience of the European issue?
This issue could be approached in two ways. First, parties could change at an individual level: similar to other political organisations, party could change as organisations as a result of their activity at the European level. This mostly concerned internal change, such as the role and relevance of MPs, or the effect of Europarties in their socialisation (Gaffney 2002). However, parties could also change as a result of party system change, that is, a change in the systematic interactions between parties at the national level, which could be caused by European integration (Mair 2000). In this case, Europeanisation would not derive from a specific form of adaptational pressure, but rather from parties reacting to contextual changes in their national political environment, such as the above-mentioned changes in voting behaviour and the growing relevance of the European issue.
Peter Mair’s seminal paper, in a contribution to Hix and Goetz’s volume on the Europeanisation of national political systems, was the first attempt to use the concept of Europeanisation to analyse party change. Mair explicitly limited himself to the second type of change identified above, that is, party system change. He investigated whether there was a discernible impact of European integration on the format and the mechanics of Western European party systems. Mair also introduced another key distinction, between direct and indirect change: while direct change referred to change happening immediately as a result of European integration, ‘indirect’ change considered other ways in which Europe can influence party systems: Mair mentioned, for example that ‘Europe imposes several constraints on the policy manoeuvrability of governments and on the parties that make up those governments’ (Mair 2000, p.4). This was a central point in his argument, since he detected little or no ‘direct impact’ of European integration on national party systems, neither on their format, since very few single-issue parties on EU integration had been created in that time framework, nor in the mechanics, since a specific pro-anti EU integration cleavage had not driven party competition. Mair’s main contention was that the absence of a direct effects of Europe on national party systems was a matter of concern for Western democracies: while the EU was increasingly influencing national politics by constraining political choices,
14 parties were deliberately leaving EU affairs out of the political competition arena, in order to preserve a competition structure which allowed their survival. In addition, parties were also taking control of the European electoral arena, making so that while the EU was increasingly constraining voting choices, there was no electoral arena in which the EU could be significantly contested, bringing to a general ‘depoliticisation’ of competition in national elections. In a later work (2007), he maintained that the EU’s biggest democratic deficit was that it did not allow the development of a political opposition within its political system, favouring the development of an opposition in principle to the EU – a form of ‘polity-scepticism’, where parties which could not develop an opposition within the EU ‘system’ were forced to develop an opposition to the system, that is, to EU integration in its entirety: he saw this to be consistent with the rise of populist and anti-establishment parties.
The ‘indirect’ effect of European integration consists precisely in the new political opportunities held by (mainstream) parties, which, in Mair’s view, use the ‘constraining’ effect of European policies to avoid facing political scrutiny and holding onto power. In general, the indirect Europeanisation of party systems involves party reaction to the new electoral opportunities arising from European integration, specifically, from its ability to drive public opinion and bring parties to compete on this new electoral divide. However, in Mair, there is a normative concerns about the effects of party Europeanisation on the democratic performance of western political systems: Mair refers this to parties’ unwillingness to compete on this new emerging cleavage, effectively keeping Europe out of domestic political competition.
However, as it can be seen, the literature on ‘indirect’ Europeanisation of party systems does not use the conceptual tools described in the first paragraph. The Europeanisation of party systems is mostly conceptualised as the adaptation of national party systems in the multi-level EU political system, and to the growing electoral opportunities offered by EU integration as a political issue. The issue is slightly different when considering the Europeanisation of individual parties. Here, the basic framework was provided by Robert Ladrech’s famous article (2002), which tried to conceptualise the different ways in which Europe ‘hits’ parties. Ladrech spoke of five ways in which parties can be changed as a result of European
15 integration: two refer to what was discussed when considering party systems, that is, changes in patterns of party competition and relations beyond the national parties systems, referring in particular to the emergence of Europarties. However, Ladrech also included three dimension of individual party change: programmatic change, organisational change and change in the relation between party and government.
In the case of programmatic change, the type of adaptation is similar to the one seen in party system change: parties can adapt their programmes to be more EU-compatible or integrate an EU agenda in their general programmatic appeal. In the other two cases, the change is more organisational/institutional. Examples of the organisational change of parties, for example, can be in their relationship with European level institutions, such as their participation in the European parliament. Finally, party-government relations can involve the growing prominence of party élites in parties in governments, thanks to the informational advantage gained by taking part in intergovernmental settings at the EU level.
The driver for the following chapters, therefore, will be to unpack the Europeanisation of party systems and the Europeanisation of individual parties. The only point which needs clarifying is if any of the individual changes depicted by Ladrech can fall into the category of ‘direct’ Europeanisation. As Ladrech himself acknowledged in a later work (2009, p.7), in fact, ‘Europe does not ‘hit’ parties in a direct manner’, since there is not a specific, legal pressure from the EU to parties. However, Europe ‘hits’ parties in different indirect ways, which involve how parties adapt to the political opportunities arising from European integration. An exception will be made by considering ‘direct’ change any organisational change which may result from European integration. In fact, in this case, the type of change that is detected is similar to the institutional change that was theorised in public policy literature. A typology of party change through Europeanisation is summarised in the table below.
16
Table 1.1: Typology of party Europeanisation
Type of change Individual party Party system
Direct Organisational
change
Emergence of single-issue parties
Indirect relation between
party members and governing élites Competition on the ‘integration’ cleavage Source: own elaboration
1.3 Europeanisation of individual parties (parties as organisations)
As clear from the previous chapter, a specific direct impact of European integration on individual parties – that is, aside from a broader reshaping of patterns of political competition and party system dynamics – is difficult to detect: this is due to the absence of a direct source of change at the supranational level, nor of a specific ‘European model’ of party politics. However, scholarly works have detected some change in political parties, namely in their adaptation to European integration. Ladrech (2002) focused on two types of change. Firstly, changes in the organisational setup of political parties, that is, how parties adapt internally to European integration. This kind of change essentially concerns how parties have adapted their organisations in light of their presence in the European Parliament and, specifically, in Europarties. While it was said that the ability of Europarties to form a genuine ‘European’ dimension of competition was questioned, another way in which Europarties could affect parties at the national level could be by affecting their organisation, for example, by including the MEP delegation in the decision-making process at the national level. However, the result of this was that there was only a limited and not systematic effect on EU integration on party organisation, a result which was later confirmed in the large comparative study edited by Poguntke and Aylott (2007). On a formal level, usually these changes refer to EP delegations being include in national executive bodies, or a post within the internal organisation dedicated particularly to EU affairs. Informally, there are ways in which parties can be linked with EU specialist, through personal networks or ad hoc working groups (Poguntke and Aylott 2007, p.197). however, these changes depend on the specific context of each party, and there is not a clear discernible impact of European integration on party organisations: rather, a limited form of institutional adaptation – variable according to the organisational culture of each party – takes place.
17 The second dimension of change that was theorised was more promising, involving a change in the parties’ internal balance of power. Here, the main finding was that party élites gain power vis-à-vis other party members by participating in the decision-making process in EU institutions. This happens because party élites gain an informational advantage through their participation in EU-decision making settings, such as the Council. In part, this relates to the strong ‘executive bias’ of EU policy-making (Poguntke and Aylott 2007), and connects to the general claim that European integration can contribute to a stronger fusion between parties and state structures (Katz and Mair 1995, van Biezen and Kopecky 2014). Consequently, scholarship generally agrees that a side-effect of European integration is the increasing of party élite power within their parties. As noted by Raunio (2002), in fact, European integration consolidates centralisation of decision-making, strengthening the powers and autonomy of party leaders. Moreover, the nature of decision-making in European institutions such as the Council makes party élites rather protected from ex-ante and ex-post scrutiny. Clearly, this advantage for political élites is strong in the case of parties in government rather than in opposition, since it is by taking part in EU decision-making settings that this advantage develops. This is related to the general claim, put forward especially by intergovernmentalists (Moravcsik 1994), that executives are strengthened by EU integration: accordingly, party élites are strengthened because of the strengthening of the institution in which they take part (Poguntke and Aylott 2007, p.291).
1.4 Indirect Europeanisation, from Europeanisation to politicisation
As mentioned in the previous paragraph, indirect Europeanisation is linked to partisan reactions to the strategic opportunities arising from the growing relevance of European integration as an issue in the domestic electoral arena. While, however, European integration had started to gain significance in national politics, notably through referendums on EU-related issues, parties seemed to be successful in avoiding direct competition over the issue, keeping the issue as a ‘second-order’ one.
The issue became relevant again in the aftermath of the failed referendums on a European Constitution in France and in the Netherlands. In these referendums, a
18 detachment between party positions on the EU and public opinion started to be noted (Steenbergen et al. 2007, de Vries 2009). Scholars started focusing on the drivers of votes on EU referendums. What this line of research showed was that referendums on Europe followed very complex dynamics, in which parties did not only react to voter opinion on Europe, but also effectively cued their partisan voters into supporting their EU-position, and contributed to shaping voting opinion. However, this was highly contingent on the specific context not only of the country, but also of the campaign, as is general the case with the highly volatility of referendum campaigns (Hobolt 2009). In general, the most famous statement relative to the European integration issue in public opinion was that it was something akin to a ‘sleeping giant’, a formulation introduced by van der Ejik and Franklin (2004). They found that the European issue was increasingly salient, and that while parties had, until that moment, avoided contesting national elections on Europe, its politicisation by policy entrepreneurs, especially parties on the extremes of the political spectrum (de Vries and Edwards 2009), was only a matter of time.
In effect, towards the end of the 2000nds, the two dominant schools investigating the politicisation of European integration started to develop. One will be named the ‘Zurich school’, referring to the work done especially by Hanspeter Kriesi, Edgar Grande and their collaborators. Kriesi and Grande, political sociologist by formation, focused in particular on the changing patterns of political conflict in Western European democracy, and in two seminal works (2008, 2012) argued that European party systems were reshaping, aligning on an ‘integration-demarcation’ cleavage. This cleavage, built on the GAL-TAN cleavage originated in the post-materialist revolution in the 1970s and most famously theorised by Inglehart (1970), included conflict on globalisation and European integration. The second school is represented by the ‘post-functionalist’ approach, identifiable with the works of Hooghe and Marks, and specifically of the seminal article introducing the concept (Hooghe and Marks 2008). The idea behind post-functionalism is that supranational integration cannot be explained anymore with functional pressures within national states – which was the basis of neo-functionalism – but that conflicts over identitarian issues was key to explain the choice for supranational integration. These two ‘schools’ sparked a great body of scholarly work on the pre-conditions, causes and effect of political conflict over European integration – which profoundly
19 shaped the direction of scholarly research on parties and European integration in the following years.
The main point of contact of these two schools was the analysis of European integration as a dependent variable: contrary to more traditional approaches in Europeanisation studies, this line of research aimed to analyse how political conflict at the national level could affect supranational integration. The second point of contact was that political conflict, and specifically the concept of ‘politicisation’, was an increasingly relevant variable to explain how the domestic contestation of European integration could affect its direction. The most popular definition of politicisation views it as ‘an increase in polarisation of opinions, interests or values and the extent to which they are publicly advanced towards the process of policy formulation within the EU’ (de Wilde 2011). While this leaves open the choice of both political actors as well as arenas in which to contest Europe (de Wilde et al.2016), political parties were always considered to be the central political actors in driving politicisation (Grande and Kriesi 2016).
The two schools, however, differed on a number of important issues. First among these is the question of which kind of parties drove contestation on European integration. Postfunctionalist theory, with its focus on conflict over identitarian issues, gave a prominent role to challenger parties, especially on radical right parties. Hooghe and Marks (2008), focusing particularly on identity conflicts, noted that parties on the extreme had a stronger incentive to politicise European integration, and that radical right parties were particularly prone to emphasizing identity conflicts. Conversely, mainstream parties saw bigger risks in competing over European integration, and largely shied away from the topic. On the opposite, subsequent studies found that mainstream parties actually played a key role in driving politicisation. On the one hand, as shown by Grande and Kriesi (2016), competition over European integration did not always follow a mainstream vs challenger dynamic. On the opposite, in some crucial cases such as the UK and France, competition over Europe followed a government-opposition dynamic between the (two) principal mainstream parties. Moreover, subsequent scholarship emphasized the power of framing strategies in driving competition over European integration, referring to how parties communicate over European integration and, specifically, ‘which arguments are chosen by political actors to justify their
20 positions’ (Helbling et al. 2010). Research on this field, which gained from insights from political communication studies (see Statham and Trenz 2013, Hoeglinger 2016) showed that parties could use a variety of frames to justify their positions towards European integration, which were not limited to identitarian frames but included economic as well as ‘utilitarian’ frames, relating to specific policies rather than broader cultural or economic arguments (Hoeglinger 2016, p.108). In sum, while radical right parties, focusing on nationalistic and identity issues, can be key actors in driving politicisation, their effectiveness in doing so was shown to be highly contingent on the context in which they contested Europe. In some key moments of European integration, notably the French referendum for the Constitutional Treaty in 2005, it was actually mainstream parties, especially the Socialist Party, that drove a significant portion of the opposition vote towards the Treaty (Statham and Trenz 2013).
The ‘politicisation’ shift in EU studies also engaged in other important questions. Most importantly, it challenged existing theories of European integration, providing for innovative theoretical frameworks to make sense of EU integration in the last decade (Hodson and Puetter 2019, Bickerton et al. 2015). However, for what concerns the role of political parties, the main point of contention is whether politicisation acts as a ‘constraining dissensus’ on pro-European parties, as theorised by post-functionalist theory, or if, in turn, politicisation can be exploited by parties to advance their European agenda. As it was shown, the key takeaway from the scholarly research is that politicisation provides a strategic opportunities that parties can exploit: whether this benefits Eurosceptic parties, especially on the extremes of the political spectrum, or mainstream parties, depends on the contingent nature of the country in question and on the strategies of each party. With the ‘post-functionalist shift’, political parties are not anymore subject to the transformative impact of European integration, but rather the opposite, since EU integration is increasingly salient and polarising within the public opinion of member States. This provides new opportunities for parties to contest the EU issue. This does not necessarily limit parties: quite the opposite, it is the direction of supranational integration that changes as a result of domestic contestation.
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1.5 Politicisation as an example of Europe’s transformative impact?
In this chapter, the development of the literature on Europeanisation and political parties was recalled. The starting point was that the general concept of Europeanisation, developed in the public policy field, was originally applied to political parties to detect political change happening at the domestic level. It was seen that this concept proved to be ineffective in detecting the kind of political change stimulated by European integration in other fields: first, because there was not a direct source of EU influence, second, because parties proved to be quite resistant to change. This was particularly evident in the case of the Europeanisation of parties as organisations: in this case, the only relevant change was associated with a broader institutional change associated with Europeanisation, that is, the strengthening of governmental élites through their participation in EU decision-making bodies. Party élites gained power through their participation in such bodies: this was, however, a rather indirect source of change.
Focusing on the Europeanisation of party systems, the results of the analysis were more complex. As a matter of fact, it was seen that scholarly work in the last 15 years has shifted towards the concept of politicisation in the analysis of European integration and party competition. This was the most promising inclusion of domestic politics in the analysis of European integration. No recent theory of EU integration – not even newer versions of intergovernmentalism (Bickerton et al. 2015) – have tried to conceptualise EU integration without accounting for to domestic contestation of Europe. As it was seen, the most promising theoretical approach to make sense of party contestation of the EU - and its effects on the direction and nature of European integration, is still the post-functionalist approach. Post-functionalism inaugurated a new research agenda, in which, contrary to the more traditional Europeanisation scholarship, European integration was the dependent rather than independent variable in research designs: party competition was conceptualised as a key intervening factor that supranational actors cannot avoid considering when developing European integration. The main takeaways from post-functionalism are that 1. parties increasingly contest EU integration, and that 2. conflict over EU integration is likely to include questions of identity, and to be brought forward by challenger parties. It was also seen that while the main claims
22 made by post-functionalism were confirmed, later studies have refined the theory by developing further insights over the functioning of politicisation and its mechanisms at the domestic level. The key elements are that 1. politicisation is best conceptualised as a strategic opportunity, that parties can dispose of by politicising, but also depoliticising, European integration, and 2.mainstream parties are not necessarily weakened by politicisation, but can themselves play a pivotal role in shaping discourse and competition over European integration, in many cases much more than challenger parties. As a matter of case, it was not by accident that the single most prominent case of EU politicisation at the domestic level- Brexit- developed largely due to the political (mis)calculations of a mainstream party (Hobolt 2016).
To what extent can post-functionalism be an answer to Mair’s original argument about the ‘depoliticising’ effect of party competition? It is believed that post-functionalism provides with an important qualification to Mair’s original claim: as a matter of fact, European integration is becoming more and more contested in national elections, and party system are becoming increasingly more structured on an ‘integration-demarcation’ divide (Hutter et al. 2016). However, Mair’s claim about mainstream parties still holding significant power is still valid: mainstream parties, in fact, have significant power in framing European integration and shaping competition.
Another important question that remains to be answered is if by shifting to post-functionalism and politicisation, one is still answering the same question as earlier Europeanisation studies, that is, whether there is a transformative power of European integration on political parties. In fact, at a first look, studies dealing with politicisation at the national level do not theorise any sort of top-down pressure. Moreover, competition on the European issue has not, to date, fundamentally restructured party systems at the domestic level (Hutter and Kriesi 2019). European integration, however, is not a ‘sleeping giant’ anymore: its salience is increasing in national elections, and parties find it difficult to completely ignore the ‘European issue’ when contesting them (Hobolt and Hoerner 2020). In this sense, one can say that party politics in Western European democratic systems is indeed becoming ‘Europeanised’. Therefore, it is believed that the concept of politicisation not only provides valuable insights on the transformative impact of ‘Europe’ – in its wider
23 sense – on domestic party systems, but also shows that this transformative impact has become stronger over time, due to the growing politicisation of the issue at the domestic level.
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2. Analytical and methodological approaches to party
Europeanisation
2.1 Research designs and the challenge of party Europeanisation
When tackling the research designs used in Europeanisation studies, we immediately face specific problems that have been faced by scholars going through this research path. Europeanisation has posed a series of analytical and methodological challenges: some are general to the concept (Exadaktylos and Radaelli 2012), but its application to political parties has been especially challenging (Ladrech 2013). Moreover, the methodological debate has evolved over time, since the postfunctionalist ‘shift’ caused a substantial redressing of the research questions and of the general aims of research in this area.
The most important problem in Europeanisation research consists in the ‘challenge of causality’ (Radaelli 2012). Because institutional change is a multi-casual process, in which it is difficult to separate endogenous from exogenous sources of change, the main challenge faced when analysing Europeanisation has been precisely to understand how does change happen, which variables are involved, and how the specific ‘mechanism of change’ can be reconstructed. In fact, with Europeanisation, causation is not linear, and uncovering it requires controlling for multiple intervening variables and sources of change. Thus, finding the appropriate research design has been a crucial task for scholars in the field. Concerning political parties, it has already been outlined that, due to the absence of a ‘direct’ source of change at the European level, the challenge of establishing causality and isolating the effect of ‘Europe’ is even more difficult than in other fields. In the case of parties, in fact, the ‘domestic sources’ of change, emphasized in the definition of Europeanisation put forward by Borzel and Risse (2003), becomes even more essential. Thus, it was claimed that research designs in party Europeanisation required an in-depth analysis of the domestic factors which could potentially influence party change (Ladrech 2013). In general, in the first period of Europeanisation research, prior to the ‘postfunctionalist’ shift, the key analytical problems consisted in how to properly detect a transformative effect of Europe. In
25 terms of research design, therefore, one should consider, first, the problems that ‘traditional’ Europeanisation studies had faced, and second, how these challenges evolved over time, as the academic focus shifted more clearly onto domestic party competition. More precisely, it is believed that a double set of challenges had to be faced by scholarly work in the area:
The first problem posed by Europeanisation studies is an epistemological problem. This is relative to which findings is it possible to aim for but, in particular, the extent to which findings can retain their validity over time and space. In other words, scholars had to face the challenge of the generalisability of findings in party Europeanisation. Several scholars (Mair 2007, Ladrech 2013) noted that the analysis of party Europeanisation required an in-depth analysis of few case studies, in order to understand how institutional change happens. This includes an important issue about case selection (Haverland 2007). Should research aim for generalisation and large-N studies, or privilege more in-depth studies of fewer cases? Naturally, this has an impact over what findings can emerge and how they can be generalised.
Secondly, there was a methodological issue: what is the best methodology to use in order to understand the transformative impact of ‘Europe’ on parties and party systems? This is, quite clearly, linked to the different research designs involved. As it will be seen, scholarly works on Europeanisation and politicisation have mostly considered a qualitative research framework. The reason for this is that, usually, studies on Europeanisation have been case rather than variable oriented, in order to better appreciate the domestic conditions for party Europeanisation. However, studies focusing on politicisation have increasingly made use of mixed-methods studies: in part, this is due to insight from other disciplines, such as political sociology (Kriesi and Grande 2015) or political communication (Statham and Trenz 2013).
In sum, identifying the appropriate research designs for analysing party change and European integration has involved different challenges: firstly, the challenge of achieving significant comparative research designs, trying to mediate between the need to account for domestic variables and the need to reach generalisable conclusions. This has emphasized the problem of case selection. Secondly, within the framework of a general qualitative methodology, research has involved a
26 pluralism of methods. The use of different methods, as it will be seen, reflects the growing disciplinary variety of the field.
2.2 Case selection
Case selection in Europeanisation studies, on a first account, would seem to be the less controversial feature of its research design. In fact, from an analysis of the literature, it is evident that scholarship has focused on Western Europe much more than on any other country. As a matter of fact, when the field was starting to develop in the late 1990s, Central-Eastern European countries still had not joined the EU, and it made little sense to focus on the transformative impact of Europe in countries that still had not joined: as mentioned in the first chapter, Europeanisation studies developed within the field of EU integration theory, and therefore it came automatic to limit the field to Western Europe. Another important point is that, in early research, scholars either sought to include all Western European countries, or limit to single-case studies. For example, Hooghe et al. (2002) use a sample of 13 Western European countries in order to show that the parties’ ideological positioning was the stronger predictor of its positioning on European integration. However, this research could not account for all the different dimensions of change in parties.
More in general, the challenge faced by Europeanisation studies was the difficulty to detect change in the absence of a control variable, that is, a case where the independent variable -namely, European integration – is absent (Haverland 2007). Moreover, because the effect of European integration is not immediately detectable in the case of political parties, it is also difficult to adopt other methods which had been more useful when focusing on other policy areas, such as counterfactual reasoning, or including in the sample extra-EU cases (Haverland 2007).
This problem of comparability has been approached in two ways: firstly, some scholars have widened the number of cases, trying to limit their analysis on the investigation of more specific variables. As seen, this was the case with studies focusing on party positioning on European integration (Ray 1999). However, other studies also went in the other direction, trying to focus in more depth on a smaller number of cases. This includes some single-case studies (Aylott 2002). The rationale for in-depth studies of few cases was that, in order to detect internal change in parties, research had to dig deeper into the workings of parties as
27 organisations, including the more informal institutional elements. For this reason, qualitative analyses of few specific cases were preferred, in order to provide for ’thick descriptive accounts’ (Mair 2007) that could account for the nuances of the parties’ internal workings.
In most cases, single-case studies were tied together in large country researches, as was the case with Poguntke and Aylott’s (2007) study of party Europeanisation, or research by Lewis and Mansfeldova (2006) focusing on enlargement to Central and Eastern Europe. This type of analysis had the merit of allowing a form of comparison, since in these two cases the findings of single case studies fed into the conclusions by the editors, which allowed some form of comparison and a delineation of the general findings. However, analyses remained at a rather descriptive level.
With the ‘postfunctionalist’ shift, the problem of case selection changed considerably. Firstly, postfunctionalists focused on elections rather than on organisational change. This made cross-country comparisons easier, since the analysis of single cases included the measurement of variables- such as politicisation (Hutter et al. 2016) – that could more easily ‘travel’ both spatially and temporally. Moving away from descriptive analysis towards more deductive and variable-oriented approaches, post-functionalism went some way forward in reaching generalisable reaching findings.
This, however, does not mean that single-case studies were not present after the ‘post-functionalist’ shift. Single-case studies analysing, for instance, the 2005 failed French referendum on the Constitutional Treaty (Statham and Trenz 2013), the Euro-crisis (Schimmelfennig 2014) and, obviously, Brexit (Hobolt 2016), continued to proliferate. In part, the rationale for a single-case approach appeared justified, since these works focused on important critical junctures in European integration: because the domestic contestation of the EU was particularly visible in some specific moments of integration, single case studies could still be useful to understand the mechanisms of domestic contestation in some key steps of integration. However, also in this case, the insights compared to comparative research designs were limited (Hutter et al. 2016).
There are, however, some limitations in the selection of cases for politicisation. Firstly, scholars have tended to privilege certain countries instead of others. With
28 the obvious exception of the UK, which has received increasing attention after the Brexit referendum, scholarly work has focused more on countries such as Germany and France (Guineaudau and Persico 2013) or other northern European countries (Green-Pedersen 2012). Also Hutter et al.’s comparative work, which is the most complete research on the politicisation of Europe to date, focuses on only six countries – France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Sweden and Switzerland – leaving aside important member states such as, for instance, Italy. Partly, this is because research on this topic has flourished especially in the academic traditions of certain specific countries. However, it is also the case that this instance of case selection reflects a problem of data availability: some countries, especially Western European, have a wider range of data available on public opinion and party systems. While pan-European datasets are available, as will seen further on, they have not been used consistently within different countries.
In sum, when selecting cases, scholars have mostly relied on Western European cases, particularly focusing on their countries of origin and/or of better knowledge: this has meant that comparative research has often focused on the same countries. The shift towards variable-oriented studies, particularly evident after the ‘postfunctionalist’ shift, has in part corrected this, but lack of consistent definitions and methods used – as will be shown – still means there is some work to do in order to reach a common approach that can be applied uniformly to all European countries.
2.3 Methodologies
The methodological approach in the study of parties and Europeanisation has been the most challenging elements of research designs on the topic. As matter of fact, the discipline has seen an increasing methodological variety. This variety reflect, on the one hand, the ‘theoretical’ shift between Europeanisation and politicisation, which has shifted the discipline away from the use of the more traditional methods linked with Europeanisation, predominantly qualitative approaches including interviews, process-tracing and the analysis of party documents, to more mixed-method approaches including electoral data, manifesto coding and media data.
Originally, party Europeanisation was an exclusive remit of comparativists and more traditional scholars of political parties. Therefore, the methodological debate was limited to the specific debates between these experts. As mentioned throughout
29 this work, analyses of parties and the EU were either concerned with the transformative impact of the EU on parties as organisations, or sought to explain the variation of party positioning on the issue. The latter topic, more than the former, has seen the biggest variety of approaches, as well as the more intense debate among academics.
Firstly, research on the transformative impact of Europe on political parties has been predominantly qualitative. Scholars mostly addressed the ‘causality’ problem, trying to unpack the precise sources of change inspired by European integration, trying to use qualitative approaches, such as semi-structured interviews and document analysis, with ‘process-tracing’ approach (Poguntke and Aylott 2007), that is, trying to reconstruct chronologically the process of adoption and institutionalisation of specific rules and practices. This approach was especially effective in giving the comprehensive and detailed account that was indispensable to detect the kind of organisational change associated with Europeanisation. However, it was also challenging, since, as noted by Ladrech (2009), using the tools applied to public policy analysis was challenging for parties, in the absence of a specific source of change. As he noted, the methodology used for Europeanisation in the public policy field could not capture the full extent to which Europe impacted on national political parties, for which a broader theoretical and methodological approach was needed.
In terms of methodological contributions to the field, a major one was given by the ‘North Carolina’ school (Mudde 2012), the group of scholars who would eventually inspire the postfunctionalist turn. Liesbet Hooghe, Gary Marks and other scholars affiliated at the University of North Carolina (hence the name) mainly contributed to develop a measurement of party positions over EU integration. They measured party orientations towards the EU by relying on country expert surveys, which were believed to be a more accurate source of data than manifestos. In fact, expert data was deemed to be a more unbiased and valid source of information than manifesto data, which represents information according to the parties’ own perception, and cannot account for any difference between the party’s formal positioning and its actual behaviour (Marks et al. 2007). This methodology was used in the seminal article on party positioning over European integration (Hooghe et al. 2002), in which it is found that parties contest EU integration on a ‘GAL-TAN’ cleavage,
30 which crosscuts traditional left-right orientations. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey has become an authoritative data source for party positions on EU integration, overcoming some of the shortcomings on relying on manifesto data.
There were also instances where manifesto data and expert surveys were combined together. In an attempt to account for the internal dissent among parties on European integration, Pennings (2006) matched results from expert surveys and manifesto data. He found that mentions of European integration in party manifestos were influenced by the party’s internal dissent on the topic. This emphasized that while party contestation of Europe was linked to its ideology, there was also a crucial strategic motivation. After the ‘postfunctionalist’ shift and the increasing focus on politicisation, party scholars had to face what was labelled the ‘salience’ problem (Mudde 2012). According to Mudde, these methodological approaches had difficulty in accounting for the relative importance of European integration vis-à-vis other issues in domestic competition. Moreover, the introduction of the concept of ‘politicisation’, with its three elements of issue saliency, actors expansion and polarisation (de Wilde 2011), offered a variety of new strategies and measures to conceptualise politicisation.
Some authors equated politicisation with salience: these studies measured politicisation by linking it with the relevance of European integration in party discourses over time (Guineaudau and Persico 2013). This was analysed by relying wither on manifesto data (ibid.) or on parliamentary speeches over Europe (Green-Pedersen 2012). What this data emphasized was that politicisation of European integration remained limited and, furthermore, that party strategies played a prominent role in de-emphasizing the issue, which highlighted the strategic dimension of party contestation of Europe. Clearly, however, this also reflected a limitation of the data, in that both manifestos and parliamentary debate focus on the parties’ own choices about how to contest Europe. Furthermore, another problem was that this data tended to avoid the ‘dynamic’ component of politicisation (de Wilde and Trenz 2012): an issue might be less politicised in the party’s issue-emphasizing through its official manifesto or public speeches, but nevertheless gain prominence in the election campaign by entering the public opinion arena.
A key contribution in analysing the ‘dynamic’ element of politicisation and party competition was given by those scholars (Statham and Trenz 2013, Hutter et al.
31 2016) which chose to focus on mass media as an ‘indispensable source for studying politicisation’ (Dolezal et al. 2016). The use of mass media as data was especially popular in political communication and political sociology (de Vreese et al. 2001, Trenz 2004), and it had the advantage of allowing for a dynamic view of party contestation on Europe. As a matter of fact, the rationale for the use of mass media data lied precisely in the more realistic view that it gave of political debates, which could not be limited to the party’s own choice of themes. This is especially relevant in view of the importance accorded to framing (Hoeglinger 2016): in fact, this method implied the use of relational content analysis, where grammatical sentences are taken from a newspaper article to include a relationship between a subject (a political actor) and an object (a specific issue). These sentences were coded according to the view of European integration expressed: -1 if negative, 0 If neutral, +1 if positive, with -0,5 and +0.5 to capture ‘conditional’ statements. Furthermore, methodology has offered a more detailed account of the ‘European issue’: the frames, that is, the justifications for positions on different issues, were classified in three categories: ‘economic’, ‘identitarian’ and ‘other utilitarian’ (the latter one a residual category). While this methodology had too its obvious limitations, particularly considering the biased nature of some newspaper data, it greatly enriched the field.
Summing up, methodological approaches on party Europeanisation have seen the greatest variety in the analysis of party system Europeanisation: this is particularly the case with the Chapel Hill expert survey, a comparable and unbiased source of party positioning on European integration which has been impressively successful in this scholarly field, and the increasing use of media data. The latter source has allowed for a more detailed and ‘dynamic’ view of party competition on Europe, which could be better analysed both diachronically, without the limitations of the 4-year time-span of each Chapel Hill survey, and multi-dimensionally, since it allows to ‘unpack’ the ‘European issue’ into its cultural, economic and policy components.
2.4 Towards analytical variety: good or bad?
The research designs and methodologies utilised to analyse party (system) Europeanisation have changed drastically since the beginning of this research agenda. Compared to the first studies, the topic has benefitted from a stronger
