Governance, Europarties and the challenge of democratic representation in the EU: A case study of the Party of European Socialists

Abstract

Earlier versions of this article were presented at the 2010 UACES Annual Conference in Bruges and the workshop on 'Where now for Europarties: reflections post Lisbon?' organised on 20-21 June 2011 at Maastricht University. Sections draw on and develop ideas previously published in Lightfoot (2012) The PES and the Future of Social Europe. Queries No 2(8) 2012. Thanks to the participants for their comments and to the referees for their perceptive comments and suggestions for improvement. Natalia Timus also provided helpful comments on the final draft.Abstract Europarties are at the centre of the potential democratisation of European governance and their development is key to supranational representation. The authors will address the more general question of why Europarties have not so far shaped significantly European governance and policy by focusing on one of the main Europarties -the Party of European Socialists (PES). This article tests a number of claims about the factors accounting for weak Europarty influence over European Union (EU) governance. In this article, the authors discuss these claims by considering successively three complementary interrelated dimensions: the constraints placed upon the social democratic family by the EU institutional environment, the PES socio-economic policy offer and the collective action problem in relation to fighting European elections as a unified party on a unified platform.

Explaining the reform of the Europarties’ selection procedures for Spitzenkandidaten

“…This observation adds to the debate on whether Europarties can be analyzed using theories and approaches tailored to national political parties (Switek, 2016). Whereas some scholars have expressed reservations about the comparability of EU institutions more generally, a growing number of studies apply frameworks from national party research to European political parties (Bressanelli 2014;Külahci and Lightfoot 2014). We follow this line of research at the junction of party politics and European integration by applying an analytical framework of national parties' candidate selection reforms to the situation of Europarties.…”

Is the Governance of Europe's Transnational Party System Contributing to EU Democracy?*

“…The same applies to the rights of individual members in the parties. Overall, their rights to participate and influence the internal decision‐making have remained very limited, and important decisions such as the development of the political platforms, the selection of lead candidates and the campaign strategies for the European elections remain under the tight control of the national member parties (see for example Klüver and Rodon, 2013; Külahci and Lightfoot, 2014; Put et al ., 2016; Wolfs et al ., 2021). It is thus not reasonable to expect that these parties will strengthen the participatory links with their members without any formal demands tied to authorization or funding.…”

“…We acknowledge that the EU's transnational party system differs from national ones and that insights derived from national experiences cannot be transposed to an EU setting without qualification. Here we join an existing literature that have drawn insights from research on national party systems to analyse the European system (seeBressanelli, 2014;Johansson, 2015;Hertner, 2019;Külahci and Lightfoot, 2014;Lord, 2010).…”

The Second Time Around: Status Quo and Reform of the Europarties’ Selection Procedures for Spitzenkandidaten in 2019

“…However, Mair (2005) has argued that we should consider the European Union as a political system, which allows us to apply concepts and theories that were developed for a domestic context to the European Union. Although there still are significant differences between national and European parties, these Europarties still share sufficient features with their national counterparts and several scholars have applied concepts from (national) party research to European political parties (Bressanelli 2014;Lord 2010;Lightfoot 2006;Külahci and Lightfoot 2014;Johansson 2015, Put et al, 2016.…”