Understanding Causality and Change in Party Politics

Abstract

Europeanization and party change is a relatively recent area within the growing corpus of Europeanization studies. Policy and institutional change at the domestic level have constituted the main foci, helped by the fact that domestic change attributed to the European Union (EU) — or more precisely some aspect of EU activity — is relatively amenable to research methods such as process tracing (Haverland, 2007). It is also the case that explaining institutional and/or policy change had been given sustained attention early on in the development of the Europeanization research agenda, producing explanatory concepts such as ‘goodness of fit’ and so on. Scholarly attention to political parties and the EU is, strictly speaking, not a new area of study, as the literature on European integration and parties can be traced back, in general, at least to the midto late 1970s, coinciding with the first direct elections to the European Parliament (EP) (e.g., Henig, 1979) and formation of transnational party federations (e.g., Pridham and Pridham, 1981). The attention brought to the impact of the EU on domestic parties is also of a more recent engagement, due to the fact that parties do not come into contact, nor have regularized channels of interaction with EU decision-making bodies or are subject to EU policy outputs. At first glance, therefore, parties and the EU operate in different and non-overlapping fields of action.