Abstract
Many observers of today’s European Union (EU) critically evaluate the role of political parties in European governance. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas, for example, assumes that European citizens misunderstand the relevance of EU politics and policy-making because of the unfulfilled task of political parties at the European level to function as a transmission belt between public opinion in the member states and the policy- and decision-makers in Brussels and Strasbourg. In Habermas’ view, furthermore, the absence of a more structured and visible role of political parties at the European level for creating and guaranteeing such communication constitutes the EU’s democratic deficit.1 In the perception of the public, however, national political parties mainly appear to offer European citizens a better understanding of EU policies. This inevitably raises the question: which roles do political parties at the European level actually perform? And do they have an impact on EU politics and policy-making?
Political parties at European level contribute to forming a European political awareness and to expressing the will of citizens of the Union.
Art. 8 A 4 Treaty of Lisbon (13 December 2007)
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Notes
See, e.g., J. Habermas (2012) The Crisis of the European Union. A Response (Cambridge: Polity Press), 134ff.
See, e.g., D. Hanley (2008) Beyond the Nation State. Parties in the Era of European Integration (Basingstoke: Palgrave), 5.
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On the various functions of national and European-level parties, see J. Mittag and J. Steuwer (2010) Politische Parteien in der EU (Vienna: Facultas Verlag), 99–123.
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T. Börzel (2009) ‘Informelle Politik in Europa. Regieren in oder durch Netzwerke’, in Gehler, Kaiser and Leucht (eds), Netzwerke im europäischen Mehrebenensystem. Networks in European Multi-Level Governance, 27–38. For a general overview on the various definition and application frameworks of policy networks for studying European governance, see T. Börzel (1997) ‘What’s So Special about Policy Networks? – An Exploration of the Concept and Its Usefulness in Studying European Governance’, European Integration online Papers (EIoP), http://eiop.or.at/eiop/texte/1997–016a.htm, date accessed 26 March 2015.
See, especially, R. Rhodes (1990) ‘Policy Networks: A British Perspective’, Journal of Theoretical Politics, 2, 3, 293–317;
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See, e.g., J. P. Olsen (2002) ‘The Many Faces of Europeanization’, Journal of Common Market Studies, 40, 5, 921–52.
W. Kaiser, B. Leucht and M. Gehler (2010) ‘Transnational Networks in European Integration Governance: Historical Perspectives on an Elusive Phenomenon’, in Kaiser, Leucht and Gehler (eds), Transnational Networks in Regional Integration, 1–17, here 10.
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Salm, C. (2016). Introduction. In: Transnational Socialist Networks in the 1970s. Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137551207_1
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