Parties at the European Level and Research Question

Abstract

The question of parties at the European level has once again become the subject of attention of political scientists. The initial wave of interest was ushered in by the decision of the Paris Summit in 1974 to hold the first direct elections to the EP in 1979. The decision to elect European parliamentarians directly as opposed to the hitherto used practice of nominating parliamentary representatives, something common to other international parliamentary bodies,¹ gave rise to the hope that the then EC would be ‘democratised’ and would, in consequence, be transformed from a Europe of nation-states to a Europe of parties² with all the vestiges such a move would bring: cross-national cleavages, parliamentarisation of the political system, party government, etc. The hopes proved to be premature, if not naïve, and interest in the topic waned.³