How is contestation on European integration structured among national political parties? Are issues arising from European integration assimilated into existing dimensions of domestic contestation? We show that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left/right dimension and party positioning on European integration. However, the most powerful source of variation in party support is the new politics dimension, ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian to Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist.

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This article explains the positions taken by national political parties on the issue of European integration over the period 1984-96. Based on the theory of party systems developed by Lipset and Rokkan, we develop a cleavage account of party response to new political issues. We hypothesize that European integration is assimilated into pre-existing ideologies of party leaders, activists and constituencies that reflect long-standing commitments on fundamental domestic issues.European integration has emerged as a major issue for national political parties. The reallocation of authority that has taken place from the mid-1980s amounts to a constitutional revolution unparalleled in twentieth-century Europe. National parties now exist in a multi-level polity in which decisions about further European integration affect virtually all of their established economic and political concerns.This article provides an explanation of positions taken by national political parties on the issue of European integration over the period 1984-96. Our point of departure is the theory of social cleavages set out by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan in 1967. 1 To what extent is the response of political parties to European integration filtered by historical predispositions rooted in the basic cleavages that structure political competition in West European party systems? Our conclusion is that the new issue of European integration is assimilated into pre-existing ideologies of party leaders, activists and constituencies that reflect long-standing commitments on fundamental domestic issues. We find that the cleavage approach to party politics provides us with a powerful set of conceptual and theoretical tools for understanding the positions of national political parties on European integration over the period 1984-96.We begin this article by outlining a theory of party position based on social cleavages. Next, we test this theory with data on party positions on European integration. Finally, we apply the theory to explain variations within the major party families.

We test competing explanations for party positioning on the issue of European integration over the period 1984 to 1996 and find that the ideological location of a party in a party family is a powerful predictor of its position on this issue, and that this is a stronger influence than strategic competition, national location, participation in government, or the position of a party's supporters. We conclude that political parties have bounded rationalities that shape how they process incentives in competitive party systems. Political cleavages give rise to ideological commitments or "prisms" through which political parties respond to new issues, including European integration.

This article addresses an issue often neglected by the current literature on political corruption: Why do citizens support corrupt governments? The authors argue that people in countries where government institutions are weak and patron-client relationships strong are more likely to support a corrupt leader from whom they expect to receive tangible benefits. Using a cross-national analysis of citizens in 14 countries, the authors find statistical evidence consistent with the hypothesis, which also complements some of the recent works on clientelism and institutional development. This has important implications for scholars and practitioners working on accountability and good governance issues because its shows that as long as corrupt leaders can satisfy their clientelistic networks by manipulating government resources, they are likely to retain political support. This, in turn, questions the assumption that a few administrative reforms can weed out corruption in countries where formal and informal institutions provide opportunities for this phenomenon to thrive.