ABSTRACT
In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in understanding how parties influence the way Europe evolves as a political issue or even as an emerging cleavage (Kriesi 2007; Down and Wilson 2010), notably how parties structure domestic competition over European issues and how they mobilise sentiments in referenda over European integration (Marks and Steenbergen 2004). This interest has become even more salient after the failure of the referenda on the EU held in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland where not only the public, but also parties had often shown clear signs of disaffection for the EU. European issues have also become more salient after the outbreak of radical Eurosceptical parties in many member states. In the attempt to understand how parties structure patterns of contestation of the EU, the large-scale comparative literature has documented a cross-national tendency to structure party positions in a similar way (Marks and Steenbergen 2004). At the same time, however, other studies have shown some important differences across countries and geographic areas. Patterns of contestation of the EU are different in the old and in the new member states (Conti 2012). In the Nordic countries partisan Euroscepticism has always been persistent (Raunio 2008) and a mounting Euroscepticism has been documented in the new member states as well (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2002; Neumayer 2008). On the other hand, the South European member states have often been defined as a region where pro-European attitudes are exceptionally widespread and the symbiosis between integration, democratisation and modernisation was very effective in the eyes of domestic politicians and decision-makers (Conti et al. 2010), at least until the eruption of the economic crisis. It seems that the EU should produce a similar broad impact upon parties – consisting of a negative influence on parties’ relevance ‘in popular terms’ (Mair 1995: 46–7) since their capacity to process key issues and be leading agents of interest aggregation and political representation was undermined consequent to the process of European integration (Gaffney 1996; Bartolini 1998, 2005; Hix and Goetz 2000) – in reality parties respond differently across the member states. In the attempt to advance in our knowledge of a phenomenon – i.e. party attitudes to the EU – that is relevant not only for democratic competition but also for the future of Europe, our research investigates in-depth the national parties in ten countries: a sample meant as representative of the wider EU since it covers old and new member states and different EU regions. 1
