ABSTRACT

This book has set out to investigate how political parties respond to European integration. It has done so by building on a comprehensive model of party behaviour that conceives political parties as rational and complex actors constrained by their institutional environment. The rationality axiom developed in the theoretical part of the study states that the behaviour of political parties is goal-oriented. However, in contrast to most rational choice models, the analytical framework assumes that parties pursue multiple goals rather than a single objective. Parties face hard choices, as trade-offs and conflict inevitably emanate from the simultaneous pursuit of these goals (Strøm and Müller 1999). The inclusion of multiple goals increases the complexity of the model in return for adequacy. Most importantly, it corrects many of the major downfalls of theories that view parties primarily as vote-maximising and office-seeking unitary entities by allowing the actor rationality assumption to be retained in light of apparently deviant behaviour. What may appear, for example, to be an irrational move from an electoral perspective, can be flawlessly rational (i.e. goal-oriented) from a cohesion-enhancing or policy-seeking vantage point. Second, I conceived the behaviour of political parties to be constrained – but not determined – by the institutional environment within which they act. I considered two institutional arenas. The first is composed of the rules that determine the contestability of a political system. The second, and by far the most important one for this study, is constituted by the structure of political cleavages. Expert surveys on partisan responses to European integration strongly suggest that contextual variables at the national level provide a poor predictor for party positions on the EU. Similarly, extant attempts to explain these positions based on national contextual factors such as electoral systems have been either unpersuasive (Aspinwall 2000) or have failed to ascertain relevant causal links (Lees 2008). Hence, the institutional variables included in the model were mainly restricted to the macrosociological foundations of political conflict described by Lipset and Rokkan (1967). The latter were assumed to function as cognitive shortcuts that structure the responses of political parties to emerging issues (Marks and Wilson 2000).