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Domestic opportunity structures and political actors’ positions are widely regarded as the most important explanatory factors for EU politicisation. The euro crisis, however, has revealed cleavages across rather than within countries, suggesting structural factors as a potential explanation for politicisation. Based on the political economy literature on Europe’s Economic and Monetary Union, this contribution develops a structural approach to politicisation with respect to countries’ power and variety of capitalism. Using a content and claims analysis of business papers in Germany, France, Austria and Ireland before and during the crisis, the findings reveal a differentiated pattern of politicisation. While an expansion of actors indicates that EMU became more politicised during the crisis, polarisation remained low within countries. Countries’ variety of capitalism and their perceived power in the EU largely explain the substance and objects of politicisation. The findings encourage further research considering structural explanations for differentiated politicisation in less elite-centred settings of politicisation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper models the correlates of parties’ positions on the issue of European integration, asking why some parties are in favour of European integration, while others are less favourable or even opposed to it. The paper builds on existing work which has identified three sets of explanatory factors predicting parties’ positions on integration: the electorate, parties and party system characteristics. By employing multilevel modelling using data on over 220 parties in 14 Western EU member states for the years 1984 to 2006, the effects of party- and context-level predictors of parties’ positions on EU integration are assessed. The findings demonstrate that parties’ positions are primarily influenced by EU preferences of the general electorate, parties’ left–right ideological extremes and incumbency status. The results also show that the impact of party characteristics is moderated by the electoral context in which parties operate. Moreover, the interaction between both levels offers further insights as to the nature of these associations. Specifically, party size is a robust predictor of integration position only when accounting for the levels of party system's fractionalisation and polarisation. Additionally, parties oriented towards the centre of the ideological spectrum are even more likely to favour European integration within highly polarised systems. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the politicisation of European tax governance in mass media. Although taxation is commonly assumed to remain a national prerogative, European institutions have extended their reach far into national tax regimes. Whether this expansion of EU authority towards one of the core functions of the nation state is accompanied by politicisation is the question to be addressed in this article. To analyse the causal nexus between growing EU authority – measured in terms of formal authority and tax legislation – and the politicisation of EU tax governance, the paper compares public debates in Germany, Ireland and Switzerland over a time period of 30 years between 1981 and 2011. Based on a newspaper content analysis, the empirical results demonstrate that EU tax governance is increasingly politicised in all three countries. Varying levels and content of politicisation across time and space are explained by national economic and socio-cultural conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Theoretical debate about the effects of politicisation on the democratic legitimacy of the European Union has tended to focus on the potential of conflict between European political parties or member state governments. At the same time, empirical sociological studies demonstrate that controversy about Europe continues to unfold primarily within national public spheres. There is as yet no genuine Europe-wide party system or public debate. This reveals a gap between the normative theoretical assessment of EU politicisation and empirical sociological analysis of this phenomenon. To reconcile this discrepancy, this paper develops three actually-existing trajectories of politicisation: the remote conflict, the international conflict and the domestic conflict. Each trajectory carries unique challenges and opportunities to the democratic legitimacy of the Union. It is argued that the domestic conflict trajectory is most promising from a normative democratic perspective. Paradoxically, this does not necessarily imply a renationalisation of the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nationalism has experienced a resurgence across Europe since 1980, and one common explanation for this resurgence is that the backlash to European integration aids radical right parties, which prioritise cultural protectionism in the form of anti-immigration and anti-ethnic minority appeals. In contrast, this article argues that, through the policy-making avenues available to certain parties, but not others, European integration encourages a different form of nationalism in highly regionalised countries: ethnoregionalism, which seeks either greater autonomy or independence for a sub-national unit. By examining how nationalist parties combine both cultural protectionism and ethnoregionalism, and the relative saliency that they attach to each, this article provides a novel way to disentangle the EU's different potential effects on nationalism. Through a quantitative analysis of party manifestos across 33 European countries for 1980–2019, this article finds that European integration has a significantly stronger effect on the saliency of ethnoregionalism than cultural protectionism. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: [DOI]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to stabilise the post-Soviet region, the European Union seeks to transform the domestic structures of the Newly Independent States. In light of high adaptation costs, the lack of a membership perspective, and low levels of democracy, the prospects of Europeanisation appear to be limited. The Southern Caucasus belongs to the most corrupt countries in the world. While being least likely cases, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia have responded to the EU's demands for good governance introducing formal institutional changes. Moreover, despite their differences in statehood, democracy, and power (a)symmetries with the EU, domestic institutional changes look very similar. This double puzzle is explained by differential empowerment. Instead of liberal reform coalitions, which are largely absent in the Southern Caucasus, the incumbent regimes have instrumentalised the EU, selectively implementing anti-corruption policies to gain and consolidate political power. As a result, the EU stabilises rather than transforms its neighbourhood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Party competition over European integration is structured by two main dimensions of political conflict: a socio-economic dimension (market liberalisation vs. a more regulated economy) and a socio-cultural dimension (libertarian, cosmopolitan values vs. authoritarian, nationalist values). This article investigates the relationship between these conflict dimensions and parties' positions towards EU issues across time and space, in particular focussing on two 'critical junctures' in the European unification process. For this purpose, analysis is made of the election manifestos of parties competing in European Parliament elections (Euromanifestos) from 1979 to 2014. First, it is found that the key moment of the Maastricht treaty significantly reshaped party competition over Europe. After Maastricht, positions towards European integration have become less connected to the economic dimension and much more related to the cultural dimension in Western Europe. Second, it is contended that the Euro crisis has not dramatically restructured political conflict over European integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis of issue politics has long suffered from a fragmentation between valence and positional conceptualisations, preventing the effective development of a general model of issue-based party competition. Building on an overview of the evolution of party competition in the Western world in recent decades, this article offers a theoretical development that builds on 'issue yield' theory to provide a conceptualisation of political goals that generalises across positional and valence issues. This in turn allows a common measurement strategy, offering the possibility to comparatively assess various characteristics (including the electoral potential) of both positional and valence issues. Finally, it describes the specific research design derived from this framework and its implementation in comparative perspective in six West European countries during 2017–2018. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do parties respond to voters' preferences on European integration in electionsto the European Parliament (EP)? Following recent research that shows politicalparty responsiveness to Eurosceptic attitudes during EP elections is conditioned byparty characteristics, this article seeks to understand how party unity on Europeanintegration affects party responsiveness to Euroscepticism. It argues that whenEurosceptic attitudes among voters are high and the parties are divided in theirposition on European integration, parties will be more responsive to voters andtake a more Eurosceptic position. To test the theoretical expectations, the studyuses data from the Chapel Hill Expert Survey, the Euromanifestos Project, andEuropean Election Study for 1989–2009 for over 120 parties across 20 EuropeanUnion member states. The findings have important implications for understandingthe nature of democratic representation in the European Union. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western European democracies opposition to the European Union is commonly found at the ideological extremes. Yet, the Euroscepticism of radical left-wing and radical right-wing parties has been shown to have distinct roots and manifestations. The article investigates whether these differences are mirrored at the citizen level. Using data from the European Election Study (2009/2014) and the European Social Survey (2008/2012) in 15 West European countries, it is found that left-wing and right-wing citizens not only differ in the object of their Euroscepticism, but also in their motivations for being sceptical of the EU. Left-wing Eurosceptics are dissatisfied with the current functioning of the EU, but do not oppose further European integration per se, while right-wing Eurosceptics categorically reject European integration. Euroscepticism among left-wing citizens is motivated by economic and cultural concerns, whereas for right-wing citizens Euroscepticism is solely anchored in cultural attitudes. These results refine the common ‘horseshoe’ understanding of ideology and Euroscepticism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How strongly is European integration being politicised in election campaigns, and what explains why a party chooses to emphasise Europe or, by contrast, remains silent about it? This article provides a systematic assessment of the salience of European integration in domestic election campaigns, tracking its development from the 1990s to the 2000s across six Western European countries based on media content analysis data. The findings show that the salience of Europe in election campaigns is actually rather limited when put into perspective by benchmarking it against other political issues. Moreover, ideological determinants are crucial in explaining European integration issue-emphasis. In particular, the more culturally conservative a party, the stronger its emphasis on Europe; the impact of the economic left–right divide, by contrast, is weaker and more ambiguous. However, Europe remains in the shadow of its twin issue, immigration, which shares a similar issue-emphasis pattern yet is more attractive to these culturally conservative parties. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the Eurozone crisis has contributed to Europeanisation trends in the domestic politics of EU member states, it has not to the same extent triggered citizen mobilisation in EU-level democratic procedures. Theories that treat politicisation as an undifferentiated phenomenon tend to miss this important distinction. This article suggests that the weakness of supranational citizen mobilisation is linked to factors that restrict the citizens’ receptiveness to EU-related messages: limited knowledge of the EU and a weak sense of political efficacy, a discursive framing that conceptualises the EU as a consortium of member states rather than a supranational entity, and attributions of responsibility for the crisis that de-emphasise the role of EU policies. These factors constitute cultural opportunity structures that influence politicisation patterns; they imply that politicisation is, under present conditions, more likely to result in a renationalisation than in a supranationalisation of EU politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature on party organisational change emphasises environmental factors as well as internal circumstances. The literature on Europeanisation and political parties privileges the EU as a key environmental factor in terms of change. This article combines insights from the party organisation and Europeanisation literatures in order to more precisely conceptualise the EU as a stimulus and therefore causal factor in party organisational change. Two types of party change are analysed, new party positions (MEPs and specialised EU party staff) and party leaderships' responses to internal dissent over the EU. Linking a specific form of EU stimulus to a particular party goal helps to explain certain types of change, while inter-governmental bargaining may produce uncertainty for domestic political actors thereby inducing defensive reactions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides an overview of the study of the European Union since the doldrums of the 1970s. We focus on three debates that have helped to shape the field. Has European integration centralised state control or is European integration part of a process of dispersion of authority? What is the role of identity in framing preferences over European integration? And, finally, is European integration part of a new political cleavage? We observe that the European Union is a moving target. It has a habit of throwing up new and unexpected facts which wrong-foot extant theories. We have no grounds for believing that this will not continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]