Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

Does EU Membership Matter?

Tim Haughton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317987383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

What impact has EU membership had on party politics in Central and Eastern Europe? Although there is an emerging body of literature on the Europeanization of political parties, most of these accounts focus exclusively on Western Europe. Drawing on a range of qualitative and quantitative approaches including detailed studies of party programmes and manifestos, analysis of the media, semi-structured interviews and expert surveys, this collection provides not just conceptually informed, but also empirically rooted analyses of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe during the first four years of EU membership. In particular, the contributions assess the impact of EU membership on parties' internal balance of power, the use of European issues in inter-party competition, the role of transnational party federations and the broader role the EU plays in party politics. The findings not only shed light on the impact of EU membership on party organization and programmes, they also inform broader debates concerning the dynamics, fluidity and motors of party politics in Central and Eastern Europe.

This book was based on a special issue of Journal of Communist Studies and Transition Politics.

Driver, Conductor or Fellow Passenger? EU Membership and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe

TIM HAUGHTON

Introduction

The European Union’s impact on the politics of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) has provoked a large body of literature in recent years, with scholars’ opinions varying markedly. While some authors see the EU as a powerful ‘magnet’ and ‘causal behemoth’, others have expressed some caution when assessing the ‘transformative power’ of the Union.¹ The vast bulk of this literature, however, has focused almost exclusively on the accession period and largely on policy and institutional change, rather than party politics,² although some work has investigated the impact of parties’ (and other actors’) choices on preferences articulated at the European level.³ What discussion there has been of post-2004 developments in party politics has tended to focus upon the elevation to power of ‘populists’ and pariah parties,⁴ provoking some analysts into describing the region as ‘unhinged’.⁵

The impact of the EU on party politics in post-2004 CEE merits attention for four reasons. First, although this collection recognizes the contribution of Lewis and Mansfeldová’s edited volume, The European Union and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe,⁶ that book was published soon after accession. While all member states had by then experienced elections to the European Parliament (EP), many of the countries studied had not held parliamentary elections when the contributions were written, precluding an analysis of party manifestos and campaigns before and after accession. Although we acknowledge that even our analysis based on four years of membership is an insufficient period to draw definitive conclusions, sufficient time has elapsed for us to reach more robust assessments. Second, some of the findings from the study of the post-accession period feed back into our understanding of how, when and why the EU had an impact on party politics during the accession period. Third, it highlights the interactions between the two levels of politics – the domestic and EU – yielding insights that feed into debates surrounding the impact of the European Union on party politics across the 27 member states. Fourth, it casts a light on factors shaping the development of party politics in the region, and indeed across a broader range of countries as well.

Following this introductory overview, the collection contains detailed case studies of party politics in Hungary (Agnes Batory), Poland (Aleks Szczerbiak and Monika Bil), Estonia (Allan Sikk), Slovenia (Alenka Krašovec and Damjan Lajh), the Czech Republic (Vít Hloušek and Pavel Pšeja) and Slovakia (Tim Haughton and Marek Rybářr). Four member states from Central and Eastern Europe are not covered in as much depth. Romania and Bulgaria were excluded given their later date of entry into the EU, whereas pressure of space precludes separate chapters devoted to Latvia and Lithuania. Nevertheless, all four countries are included in Whitefield and Rohrschneider’s comparative contribution examining issue stances, salience and programmatic coherence across all ten new EU member states from CEE.

No single, rigid methodological framework was imposed on the contributors for two reasons. First, just as golfers recognize that a single club is illsuited for all the shots required to get the ball from the tee to the hole, so we acknowledge that no single methodological super-club can provide a satisfactory answer by itself. Second, we recognize that this is an emerging field into which not just our findings, but our approaches (detailed studies of party programmes and manifestos, analysis of the media, semi-structured interviews and expert surveys), can feed into debates about the most suitable tools to use in order to assess the influence of the EU on party politics. Hence, the collection contains both in-depth country case studies drawing on qualitative approaches and a region-wide quantitative contribution based on an expert survey. Nonetheless, in order to achieve coherence and cohesion contributors were asked to consider the following seven questions designed to assess the impact of EU membership on party organizations, programmes and systems:

1. Has EU membership had any impact on the division of labour within political parties? That is, what is the role of European specialists and has this changed since accession?
2. Has EU membership had any impact on the distribution of power within parties?
3. Have parties used the European issue more in inter-party competition since EU accession?
4. Has the prominence of European issues in party programmes increased since EU accession?
5. Have links with European party federations or European Parliament groupings had a greater impact on parties since EU accession?
6. Are there any other areas where we can detect the impact of EU membership on political parties and policy discussions in the respective countries and why?
7. How can the role played by the EU during both the accession and membership periods be best conceptualized?

Expectations of Change

As Whitefield and Rohrscheider note in their contribution, we can theorize the impact of the European Union on political parties in two ways. The first stream of thought, what they label ‘dynamic representation’, is rooted in an appreciation of the dynamism of post-communist politics. Given the rapid changes in the external environment of politics experienced by CEE, including economic and political integration associated with EU membership, and the fact that political parties in the region are themselves relatively new and organizationally ‘in flux’, we might expect significant change and adaptation on the part of individual parties and the party system. Indeed, experience of integration (especially negative experiences) may reduce support for membership of the EU – which was largely a consensus item prior to joining⁷ – and may provoke parties to package their appeals differently. In line with this approach – and following the work of Ladrech⁸ on the older member states – we might expect that membership of, and interaction with, EU-level institutions may generate some organizational changes such as a role for MEPs in party bodies.

Whitefield and Rohrschneider, however, also posit an alternative perspective, which draws on the broader comparative party literature, producing expectations of stability rather than change. This view suggests that parties need to present ‘coherent and stably coherent’ policy packages to voters to help the development of party identification, and also recognizes the barriers and costs that produce incentives to parties (and to voters) to maintain stability in their issue stances and programmatically. Hence the expectation here, in line with the work of Peter Mair on Western Europe,⁹ is of limited impact on policy stances and national party competition before and after EU entry.

The level of expectations of change is likely to be rooted in one of these two perspectives, but in addition contrasts can be made between party organization and party programmes. Indeed, there are two channels for the EU to have an impact: institutions (including Europarties, MEPs and so on) and the policy agenda. In line with the work of Poguntke and his associates, we did not expect to see much of an impact in organizational terms (although we did expect to see minor changes, such as the incorporation of MEPs into party organs), but we did foresee some impact in policy terms given the fact the EU is involved in virtually every policy area.¹⁰

Moreover, the literature examining the Europeanization of parties in Western Europe hints at possible varieties across CEE. For example, the study by Poguntke and colleagues suggested that we would expect to see the intra-party power of EU specialists strengthen in large parties and large countries. Those authors maintain that ‘the argument about EU specialists presupposes a degree of organisational differentiation that will be absent in many smaller countries (and smaller parties in large countries), where it is more realistic to expect that party elites will double as EU specialists’.¹¹ We might, therefore, expect to see a different impact in, for instance, the Estonian and the Polish cases.

Research into the role of trans-national party actors suggested that they played a significant role during the accession process.¹² Spirova, for instance, suggested that ‘even though Europarties have had only a limited and indirect impact on national party systems in the older member countries ... their involvement in the East has been more pronounced’. There is logic to expecting the role of trans-national party actors to be significant even after accession. We might presume that the links created with Western parties and membership of international party organizations – what Ágh calls 'external Europeanization’¹³ – would intensify as the parties became full members of groupings in the European Parliament.

More broadly, as Batory argues in her contribution, there are several reasons for expecting the impact of the EU to gain in influence after accession. Indeed, once a country becomes a member state, its engagement with various EU structures intensifies. Involvement in Council decision making, parliamentary scrutiny and EP elections, for instance, all may have knock-on effects on the internal balance of power in parties and the attention paid to European issues reflected in party programmes and manifestos. Such expectations of change in the policy area, however, are tempered by questions of size. As Sikk notes in his contribution, given the recognition of Estonia’s clout at the EU level amongst its politicians, it is more of an EU policy-taker rather than an EU policy-maker. Nonetheless, following the expansion a number of issues, including agriculture, energy security and relations with Russia, now have a distinctly European flavour.

The preceding discussion, therefore, highlights that our expectations are likely to be tied to whether we see party politics in CEE as dynamic and fluid or more stable, although our analysis also feeds back into this debate by identifying elements of stability and change. Moreover, the literature also provokes different expectations of impact on party organizations, party programmes and the role of trans-national party actors. In order to provide a more robust analysis of the impact of the EU membership on party politics, contributors analysing particular countries were asked to assess the level of impact (high, medium or low) using the framework in Table 1.

As Batory discusses in her contribution, any attempt to assess the impact of the EU raises the perennial problem of causality. Indeed, scholars assessing

TABLE 1
FRAMEWORK: LOW IMPACT AND HIGH IMPACT BENCHMARKS

the impact of the EU on Western Europe have acknowledged the difficulties in separating out analytically the impact of Europe from national-level explanatory factors.¹⁴ We recognize that the five themes highlighted in Table 1 do not constitute the whole picture of potential and actual impacts of the EU; however, using research techniques rooted in the tradition of ‘process tracing’¹⁵ that were employed so effectively when studying conditionality,¹⁶ we can examine the causal chains and mechanisms.

Party Organization

EU membership has had some impact on party organization. In most cases there were formal changes. Thanks to the European Parliament (EP) elections, the most notable change in terms of party organization was the acquisition of MEPs and the linked changes to party statutes to incorporate MEPs ex officio into decision-making bodies, but some parties such as Civic Platform and the League of Polish Families also created new specialist EU party bodies. Occasionally the 2004 EP elections prompted organizational innovations. The Social Democrats in Slovenia, for example, established a new post of a ‘permanent deputy leader’ following the party president’s election to the European Parliament.

The formal incorporation of MEPs into formal party bodies, however, appears to have had a limited impact on the distribution of power, although there were some exceptions. For instance, as Szczerbiak and Bil note, MEP participation in the party’s parliamentary caucus and in national and regional boards brought an increased role for European policy specialists within the Civic Platform party in Poland, and led to the establishment of a new post of deputy secretary responsible for international affairs, who was in charge of a small office dealing with contacts with the party’s MEPs and Civic Platform’s sister parties.

Thanks in no small part to the size of the countries and the relative small number of MEPs for each country, even the ex officio institutional changes did not in practice have an effect for many parties that failed to win any seats in the EP. In some cases, as Sikk notes in the case of Estonia, where a party has MEPs they were perceived as ‘ambassadors to Brussels’ rather than as domestic politicians. Where MEPs do a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Abstracts
• 1. Driver, Conductor or Fellow Passenger? EU Membership and Party Politics in Central and Eastern Europe
• 2. The Dog that Did Not Bark? Assessing the Impact of the EU on Party Politics in Hungary
• 3. When in Doubt, (Re-)Turn to Domestic Politics? The (Non-)Impact of the EU on Party Politics in Poland
• 4. Force Mineure? The Effects of the EU on Party Politics in a Small Country: The Case of Estonia
• 5. The European Union: A Joker or Just an Ordinary Playing Card for Slovenian Political Parties?
• 6. Europeanization of Political Parties and the Party System in the Czech Republic
• 7. A Tool in the Toolbox: Assessing the Impact of EU Membership on Party Politics in Slovakia
• 8. The Europeanization of Political Parties in Central and Eastern Europe? The Impact of EU Entry on Issue Stances, Salience and Programmatic Coherence
• Index