European integration constrains party competition in the member states

Kyriaki Nanou and Han Dorussen describe their research into the effects of European integration on electoral competition in the EU’s member states. Their analysis considers how parties have changed their positions over time in nine distinct policy domains with varying degrees of regulation at the European level. They find that the distance between party policy positions has decreased in those areas where the involvement of the EU has increased. The effect is unique for member states of the European Union, but not equally pronounced for all parties. The EU has had the most impact on limiting the policies of larger, mainstream and pro-EU parties

European Integration, Intergovernmental Bargaining, and Convergence of Party Programmes

Over the past 50 years, the European Union (EU) has dramatically increased its policy-making power. However, there remains considerable variation over time as well as across policy areas in the relative power of the EU and the member states. The variation is likely to influence EU-wide bargaining. Following the logic of bargaining games with domestically constrained actors, or two-level games, the changes in the bargaining environment may also influence party competition within the member states of the European Union. Using manifesto data for 1951–2001, this article examines convergence of party programmes across Western Europe. It is shown that European integration has increasingly constrained the range of policy platforms. Moreover, we generally find a stronger effect if and when countries are actually members of the EU. European integration bolsters programmatic convergence of Euro-friendly as well as Eurosceptic parties. However, European integration particularly influences the convergence of Eurosceptic parties in EU member states

Changing the policy agenda? The impact of the Golden Dawn on Greek party politics

This paper focuses on the impact of the Golden Dawn on the dynamics of domestic party competition by examining whether there has been a change in issue salience since the party’s dramatic rise. Our main goal is to examine the salience of topics in the Golden Dawn’s agenda from a comparative perspective vis-à-vis the other actors in the system, in order to identify whether attention on particular issues has shifted. We proceed with an analysis of programmatic and ideological materials produced by the Golden Dawn and its competitor parties, including election manifestos and public speeches. We analyse these documents through the employment of a comprehensive framework for coding policy agendas provided by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). We find no direct effect on the salience of the immigration issue. However, there is a rise of nationalism across the party system

An ever-closer union? Measuring the expansion and ideological content of European Union policy-making through an expert survey

Only a few studies have measured the expansion of European Union competences and they have relied on information derived from consecutive treaties, producing measures that do not vary in between. But decisions on the allocation of authority to the European Union also occur regularly through secondary legislation. This article presents a new index of the Europeanisation of policy based on an expert survey. The index provides a valuable new resource, encompassing 1957 to 2014, on the distribution of authority between the European Union and member states across policy fields, and on the ideological content of primary and secondary legislation. The study discusses the contributions made to existing scholarship, presents key findings from experts’ assessments, and demonstrates how the dataset can advance research on European integration

Advantages, Challenges and Limitations of Audit Experiments with Constituents

Audit experiments examining the responsiveness of public officials have become an increasingly popular tool used by political scientists. While these studies have brought significant insight into how public officials respond to different types of constituents, particularly those from minority and disadvantaged backgrounds, audit studies have also been controversial due to their frequent use of deception. Scholars have justified the use of deception by arguing that the benefits of audit studies ultimately outweigh the costs of deceptive practices. Do all audit experiments require the use of deception? This article reviews audit study designs differing in their amount of deception. It then discusses the organizational and logistical challenges of a UK study design where all letters were solicited from MPs’ actual constituents (so-called confederates) and reflected those constituents’ genuine opinions. We call on researchers to avoid deception, unless necessary, and engage in ethical design innovation of their audit experiments, on ethics review boards to raise the level of justification of needed studies involving fake identities and misrepresentation, and on journal editors and reviewers to require researchers to justify in detail which forms of deception were unavoidable

The Eurozone crisis has increased soft Euroscepticism in Greece, where Greeks wish to remain in the euro, but no longer trust the EU

Nearly six years of recession have taken their toll on Greece, and the country is now facing difficult austerity measures from the EU, the IMF, and the European Central Bank. But what has austerity meant for Euroscepticism in the country? Using Eurobarometer statistics, Kyriaki Nanou and Susannah Verney find that while there is now a deep distrust of the EU and its institutions on the part of the Greek people, there is little appetite for the country to exit the EU or leave the euro

Focusing the Mind? How the European Union Affects Issue Coverage in National Elections

It is commonplace to assume that what determines the coverage of issues in parties’ political agendas are domestic factors such as their own issue priorities and those of their political rivals, the attention devoted by the mass media and the importance of issues to the wider electorate. However, we know very little about what can explain how issue coverage evolves over time. Do certain issues receive constant attention over time, whereas others receive more or less coverage over time? By focusing on the effect of delegation to the EU-level institutions as an external influence, this paper aims to explain whether issue coverage is more or less impervious to change. It examines the impact of increasing delegation of policymaking to the EU institutions on the coverage of issues in parties’ manifestos. It expects that, as policy competence shifts from the national to the EU level in a range of policy domains, parties place less emphasis on those issues and instead focus competition on issues where policy-making authority is largely retained by the member states. The effect is expected to vary across those groups of issues classified as either ‘principled’ or ‘pragmatic’. These expectations are tested by using ordinary least-squares (OLS) regression to analyse references to 16 issues in manifesto data covering elections from 1968-2005. The analysis involves 18 European countries

European integration and electoral democracy : How the EU constains party competition in its member states

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The present and future of psychiatric nursing education in Greece

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