The Past in the Present: A Cleavage Theory of Party Response to European Integration

Abstract

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.

Exploiting the Cracks: Wedge Issues in Multiparty Competition

“…One clear example of this is the European integration issue. This lack of fit has resulted in unusual patterns of party competition in a number of countries, where parties on both the left and right extremes advocate an anti-EU position, while centrist parties are predominantly pro-European (see Marks and Wilson 2000). Another increasingly salient issue that cannot easily be subsumed by the dominant left-right dimension is the immigration issue.…”

“…This vulnerability stems from the fact that in a two-dimensional space, winning coalitions must consist of voters and politicians who are in conflict on at least one dimension (Jeong et al 2011). When an issue that is partially or entirely unrelated to the leftright dimension is mobilized, this creates tensions for parties that compete on the left-right dimension (Marks and Wilson 2000). In the US context, consider for example the issue of race in the 1950s and 1960s that divided the governing Democratic Party.…”

“…We test our expectations in Western Europe as this allows us to examine wedge issue competition within a set of stable and democratic multiparty systems over three decades. The literature on Western European party competition has identified several issues that constitute wedge issues, such as European integration and immigration (see Green-Pedersen and Krogstup 2008;Kriesi et al 2006;Marks and Wilson 2000;Meguid 2005;Taggart 1998). Ideally, we would test our hypotheses by looking at more than a single wedge issue.…”

“…The EU issue constitutes an apposite case to study wedge issue competition comparatively because it exemplifies a wedge issue par excellence within Western European party systems. European integration is an issue that is not easily integrated into the dominant dimension of left-right politics, and therefore the process of European integration has provoked deep tensions within major parties on both the left and right (Marks and Wilson 2000). Furthermore, by focusing on the EU issue we can harness cross-temporal and crossnational data from the Chapel Hill Expert Surveys (henceforth CHES) on the degree of importance that parties attach to the EU issue as well as the level of dissent that governing parties experience.…”

13. Europeanization and Political Parties

“…Further, for parties divided over the question of European integration, a new dimension presents party leaderships with the task of containing dissent while maintaining a strategy oriented to the dominant left-right pattern of competition (Edwards 2007;Gabel and Scheve 2007). Research in this vein has continued to explore the possible impact of the EU issue on traditional alignments (van der Eijk and Franklin 2004;Hooghe and Marks 2008), and how left-right determines parties' responses to Europe (Marks and Wilson 2000;Marks, Wilson, and Ray 2002;Hellström 2008). As for the impact of the EU on national party systems, at least in pre-2004 EU member states, the conclusion by Mair (2000) has been prominent.…”