ABSTRACT
This chapter reports the findings of an investigation into the extent to which the internal life of Austria’s four main political parties has changed in response to the country’s 1995 accession to the European Union (EU).1 Although the impact of membership upon domestic politics figures prominently in recent research by Austria specialists (Tálos and Falkner 1996; Müller and Jenny 2000; Dolezal and Müller 2001; Fallend et al 2002; Müller 2002; Neisser and Puntscher Riekmann 2002; Gehler et al. 2003; Höll et al. 2003), surprisingly little research exists on how integration might have impacted upon the country’s political parties (Puntscher Riekmann et al. 2001; Pollak and Slominski 2002). For reasons discussed in this volume’s opening chapter, we hypothesize that European integration is likely to have enhanced the intra-party power of two partially overlapping categories of party actors: ‘EU specialists’ and party elites. To investigate these hypotheses, we will initially seek to establish whether Austrian parties have undertaken any structural adaptation to European integration that advantages these actors. We will then consider whether EU integration has privileged EU specialists in processes of intra-party decision-making such as manifesto formulation and if so, which sub-categories of EU specialists have benefited most. The last substantive section reports our findings regarding the degree of autonomy from their parties which EU specialists and party elites enjoy when acting at the EU level. It also considers the nature and extent of their accountability to their parties for those actions. Before commencing our detailed analysis of these issues, we shall briefly discuss the historical background to and conflicts over Austria’s EU membership, domestic institutional reform pursuant to Austria’s EU membership, and key organizational features of Austria’s political parties.
