The Role of National Party Systems in the Success of the European Integration.

The European Union as a model of economic and political integration inspires political leaders across the globe. Yet, frequently, in drawing lessons from the European success story, the role in it of the democratic electoral competition gets overlooked. In this paper we identify the peculiar characteristics of electoral competition among major domestic political parties in the member states as one of the necessary conditions of the EU integration success, and argue for the inclusion in the analysis of integration variables that characterize the domestic party systems. It has been frequently argued that the success of the European integration is due to the fact that in most European countries a broad majority of the national decision-making elites in the government, state bureaucracy, major political parties, key interest groups, and the media favor the European integration. The commitment to integration among the elites was not shared to the same extent by the voters in most EU countries. Importantly, skeptical voters had little impact on the views of the major political parties. In most European countries, stable and consolidated national party systems were able to accommodate potentially divisive issues of the European integration by means of preserving a familiar pattern of electoral competition, and thus enabled the continued elite commitment to integration. In these countries, only on rare occasions do European issues become prominent during election campaigns, and even the elections to the European Parliament are dominated by the domestic issues. In the paper, we analyze the institutional conditions in stable European democracies that make it possible for major political parties to avoid competing on the integration dimension. Based on this analysis, we argue that nations lacking those institutional preconditions would also lack the ability to subdue a new distributive issue in their political process. Such an issue as the European integration would likely become the focus of electoral competition among political parties and materially weigh on the voters? choices in those countries. We identify characteristics of electoral competition among major domestic political parties in Europe as one of the necessary conditions of the EU integration success, and argue for the inclusion in the theoretical analysis of integration variables that characterize domestic party systems. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]