The Impact of European Integration on Political Parties

Beyond the Permissive Consensus

Dimitri Almeida

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780415693745
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136340390
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book traces the positions of national partisan actors towards the development of the European polity in an in-depth comparative analysis covering all member states of the European Union over a period of 60 years. The author examines the approach of the social democratic, radical left, liberal, Christian democratic and radical right party families, eliciting a comprehensive analysis of partisan positions on European integration.

Demonstrating that attitudes and programmatic changes towards European integration must be understood both as the product of long-term ideological traditions and domestic opposition or incumbency-seeking strategies, this book examines how far common ideological traditions lead to the emergence of convergent European policies. Based on an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses political science, history and area studies, this book provides background and analysis, and develops theory in an open and accessible style that expands the understanding of party behaviour. Using party programmes and quantitative data, the book reveals considerable cross-family variations regarding the extent to which parties' genetic origins shape partisan responses to Europe.

The Impact of European Integration on Political Parties will be of interest to students and scholars of European politics, European integration, comparative politics and political parties.

1 Approaches to the study of party responses to European integration

In 1957, political parties in Germany faced hard choices. The year 1957 was a federal election year – the third federal election since the country had regained partial sovereignty in 1949. Reconstruction and economic recovery advanced at a fast pace as Germany was entering a period of considerable economic growth. The integration of ethnic Germans expelled from Central and Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War was gradually becoming a less sensitive topic. The contentious issue of the Saarland’s statute had been resolved after France and Germany had agreed to the territory’s return to Germany. Party politics were maturing as the fragmented party system of 1949 was giving way to a stable two and a half party system. Fundamental opposition to the new political system was weakened with the Communist Party’s descent towards electoral marginality and its ban by the Federal Constitutional Court. Arguably, the most salient topic in political debate remained the issue of German unity. However, a new issue was making its appearance in German political debate. On 5 July, two months before the federal election, the parties represented in the Bundestag had to vote on the ratification of the Treaties establishing the European Economic Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. The Christian Democrats had negotiated the Rome Treaties and logically approved ratification. The choices were less obvious for opposition parties. The Social Democratic Party (SPD) had inscribed the creation of the United States of Europe based on economic integration as a goal in their 1925 Heidelberg Programme (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands 1925: 110). However, in 1952, the party voted against the ratification of the Treaty of Paris establishing the European Coal and Steel Community, arguing that its provisions were detrimental to German industry (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands 1951). The same scenario was repeated one year later with the party’s No to the European Defence Community. In 1957, the SPD broke the sequence of oppositions to European integration and supported the ratification of the Rome Treaties. In a speech explaining the SPD’s position, the secretary of the social democratic group, Karl Mommer, stated that the party’s position was derived from the compatibility of the Treaties with the general political principles of social democracy (Mommer 1957). While expressing concern on the potentially negative impact of integration on the prospect of German reunification, Mommer defended the view that overcoming nationalism in Europe was worth the risk. The liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP) followed an inverse trajectory. The party had been a junior coalition partner of the Christian Democrats until 1956. After having supported the Treaty of Paris and the Defence Community, the liberal group in the Bundestag opted to oppose the Rome Treaties. Robert Margulies, the party’s parliamentary spokesman on European affairs, argued that economic integration on a small scale would further reduce the prospect of German unity, increase protectionism and offer insufficient parliamentary control mechanisms (Margulies 1957; Freie Demokratische Partei 1957).

The German partisan elite dissensus on the ratification of the Rome Treaties illustrates the dilemmas political parties face when developing programmatic responses to European integration. Most importantly, it shows the difficulties involved in identifying the factors and dynamics that shape the adoption of party positions in the field of European policy. In the case of German political parties in 1957, at least three competing, albeit not mutually exclusive, explanatory accounts can be delineated. We may focus on the belief systems of the parties under scrutiny and conceive their responses as being derived from ideological alignments. The references to internationalism as an antidote to exacerbated nationalism in Mommer’s speech and the anti-dirigiste critique expressed by the liberal group would support this line of inquiry. Alternatively, we may interpret ideological references as simple a posteriori justifications and opt to understand partisan alignments on supranational integration as following a simple role allocation along the government–opposition divide. This reasoning would allow us to explain the position of the governing Christian Democrats and the apparent policy reversal of the FDP, but it would leave the social democratic stance unaccounted for. Following another line of reasoning, we may consider that partisan stances on the Rome Treaties were subordinated to an evaluation of how the new communities would affect the pursuit of the parties’ main policy objective: arguably, the policy of Westbindung for the Adenauer Government and, even more arguably, German unity for the Social Democrats and the Liberals, the divergent responses of the latter being simply the result of different evaluations.

This exercise in ad hoc hypothesising is unsatisfactory inasmuch as it lacks theoretical insights on the determinants of party behaviour in competitive settings. In order to elucidate the factors that are relevant towards explaining party positions on specific policy issues, one must begin by developing a general model that synthetically describes the primary drivers of party behaviour. This goal is pursued in the following section.

Party competition and party goals

The first logical step in an attempt to clarify the notion of party behaviour is to inquire into the types of strategic interactions that characterise competition between political actors. In analogy to game playing, competition presupposes that the players share common goals and that their strategies will be directed at the achievement of these objectives. Thus, a straightforward way of theorising on party behaviour is to begin by defining the goals parties seek to attain. The assumption that parties are primarily interested in controlling political office is a guiding theme of classical mid-twentieth-century literature on democracy and party politics. In Schumpeter’s seminal contribution to the study of democracy, the objective power via votes represents a key component of the democratic method, a method defined as the ‘institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (Schumpeter 1942: 269). For Schumpeter, the policies that parties present to the electorate are barely relevant to the democratic method as long as they do not endanger the peaceful selection of the ruling elite (Bartolini 1999: 447). Schumpeter discards the notion that voters are able to make competent political judgements. When faced with political issues, voters tend to behave irrationally by resorting to affection and prejudice. The popular will postulated in classical theories of democracy is no more than a ‘manufactured will’ created by political leaders through marketing techniques (Schumpeter 1942: 263). A more substantial definition of democracy can be found in the works of Elmer Schattschneider. In his oft-quoted opening paragraph to Party Government, Schattschneider introduces the thesis that ‘political parties created democracy and that modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of parties’ (Schattschneider 1942: 1). Schattschneider’s unambiguous position in favour of political parties is informed by a conception of democracy centred on the notions of conflict and competition. While Schattschneider shares Schumpeter’s scepticism on classical doctrines that define democracy as ‘government by the people’,Schattschneider’s starting point is that of responsible parties competing for the people’s vote by means of alternative policies. Hence, democracy implies that conceptions of what best serves the public interest diverge: ‘It is the competition of political organizations that provides the people with the opportunity to make a choice. Without this opportunity popular sovereignty amounts to nothing’ (Schattschneider 1960: 137). In a Madisonian democracy, in which the public interest is fixed, or in an apolitical world, where every problem would have a Pareto-optimal solution, there would be no need for political parties, since there would be no meaningful alternatives on which they could compete. Political parties attempt to gain the support of voters by enlarging the scope of a given conflict or by exploiting new conflicts that expose divisions within other parties (Schattschneider 1957). By placing competition and conflict at the heart of the democratic process, Schattschneider redirects the attention of political science to the dynamic and strategic character of party politics. The complexity of strategic interactions between political parties stands in stark contrast with Schattschneider’s minimalist definition of a political party as an ‘organized attempt to get power.’ While Schattschneider concedes that the quest for power might not be an end in itself, he warns that ‘[t]o attempt to define parties in terms of the motives for which men want power is … to open a bottomless pit’ (Schattschneider 1942: 35–36).

Most formal models of political competition included in the now extensive public choice literature on parties and elections are firmly rooted on the assumption of utility-maximising office-seeking behaviour (e.g. Downs 1957; Black 1958; Hinich and Ordeshook 1970). In Downs’s (1957) influential Economic Theory of Democracy, political parties are by definition office-seekers.¹ Assuming that the goal of political parties consists in controlling political office, the role of policies and ideologies in political competition becomes instrumental. According to Downs, policy preferences articulated by political parties are directed towards vote maximisation: ‘parties formulate policies in order to win elections, rather than win elections in order to formulate policies’ (Downs 1957: 28). If the policy preferences of the electorate are assumed to be exogenous (i.e. not modifiable by political parties) and distributed along a single dimension, then the programmatic profiles of political parties will reflect the modal distribution of voters’ preferences. In two-party systems featuring a unimodal distribution of citizen preferences, both parties will hence converge towards the median voter. The Downsian approach conceives ideologies as heuristic devices for reducing information costs among the electorate by providing voters with coherent sets of cues about party policies (Downs 1957; see also Enelow and Hinich 1984).

In a vibrant plea in favour of rational choice theory, Riker (1977: 31) describes the assumption that the actions of party leaders are guided by the goal of winning elections as an inevitable finding that derives from the political equilibrium described by Downs and from the so-called Duverger law.² However, pace Riker, this assumption does not represent a universal law discovered through empirical inference. Instead, it is part of an axiomatic system that provides a set of constraints for modelling political competition. Modifying or even replacing an axiom with another may open new perspectives and insights in scientific inquiry. In geometry, for example, discarding Euclid’s parallel postulate permitted the development of hyperbolic space models. Unlike mathematics, however, in the social sciences assumptions should be benchmarked against empirical observations. While the assumption that parties always prioritise office over policies is intuitively plausible and parsimonious, it leaves significant facets of political competition unexplained and unexplored. Why are ideologically peripheral parties with apparently no opportunity of winning elections or controlling office a pervasive feature of many party systems? What leads certain politicians to leave their parties and create new political platforms with limited prospects of incumbency? Clearly, the theorem of the vote- or plurality-maximising and office-seeking party does not provide the most apposite framework to inquire into the aforementioned phenomena.

Alternatively, one might conceive parties as teams of leaders whose behaviour is primarily guided by the goal of implementing desired policies. Controlling office would thus become an instrumental variable for policy maximisation. This reversed Downsian theorem was proposed and formalised by Wittman (1973). Based on this assumption, Wittman suggests that parties and candidates may implicitly collude against the preferences of the electorate in order to see their preferred policy options implemented. These collusive interactions may consist in the ‘promotion of mutually acceptable ideologies, marginal changes in the previous administration’s policies, and recruitment of those who are not antagonistic to the other party’ (Wittman 1973: 498). With his model of political parties as policy-maximising oligopolists, Wittman anticipates core elements of the hypothesis on the cartelisation of party competition developed by Blyth and Katz (2005). Despite its innovative character, Wittman’s assumption displays two considerable weaknesses: first, it treats the policy preferences of political actors as given. This axiom precludes any attempt to explain why political actors develop certain policy preferences rather than others. Most importantly, it provides no theoretical cue as to why partisan actors may modify their preferences. The second weakness is shared with the Downsian approach and relates to the restrictive assumption on political behaviour as guided by a single goal. While explicit simplifications have the merit of reducing the number of variables under scrutiny by providing parsimonious models, parsimony per se is not a goal of scientific inquiry. To rephrase Karl Menger’s (1960: 415) criticism against mathematical reductionism summarised in his ‘law against miserliness’, variables must not be reduced to the point of inadequacy. In certain rational choice approaches, this inadequacy often takes a similar form of what Elster termed ‘hyperrationality’ (Elster 1989: 17). Elster applies this criticism inter alia to the propensity of scholars to dispel uncertainty from pervasively uncertain situations. This is precisely what the aforementioned seminal works on political competition do by imputing a single goal to political actors.

Uncertainty is an inherent feature of party competition that occurs at different levels. In its crudest form, uncertainty arises from the potential occurrence of events that are exogenous to the strategies of political actors (e.g. natural catastrophes, the weather on an election day), or difficult to control (e.g. corruption or sex scandals, terrorist attacks, economic crises). At the level of party–voter alignments, uncertainty may originate from parties’ incomplete information about voters’ preferences. In interparty interactions, there is uncertainty about the amount of information an opponent has, or about what his next tactical move will be. However, the kind of uncertainty that proves most interesting for the development of a framework for analysing the behaviour of partisan actors is the uncertainty that arises from the multiplicity of goals parties seek to attain.

The assumption that parties may pursue more than one goal is implicitly made by Schlesinger (1975) in a review of Downs’s and Riker’s contributions to the study of political competition. Schlesinger distinguishes between office- and benefit-seeking³ politicians and discusses the strategic and organisational implications of these two behavioural patterns. While Schlesinger analyses both goals as priorities that define different groups of political actors, he concedes that, in practice, these two primary goals coexist within political parties:

In the real political world no party consists solely of office- or benefit-seekers. Conflicts within parties arise, therefore, not simply because of ideological or policy differences, but because two goals impose conflicting strategies for winning elections and for organising parties.

(Schlesinger 1975: 849)

Strøm (1990) goes one step further in specifying the conflicts that originate from different party goals by constructing a general model of party behaviour that departs from the restrictive assumptions of previous models. Strøm develops an axiomatic system based on three party goals: votes, office and policy. While these three objectives may appear prima facie as complementary, there are nevertheless trade-offs and potential collisions between them. A first set of trade-offs is endogenous to the dynamics of party competition. Although votes are not considered as a party goal on their own but rather as an instrument for controlling office (Downs 1957: 34–35), the relationship between votes and office can be considerably more complex. In multiparty systems featuring government coalitions, vote maximisation is not necessarily a prerequisite for incumbency. In these settings, smaller parties can be the pivotal actors responsible for making or breaking governing coalitions. Another trade-off emerges if the time element is taken into account. From a long-term perspective, incumbency might collide with the goals of vote maximisation and office in an upcoming election (Rose and Mackie 1983; Strøm 1985: 740, 1990: 573). This is most often the case whenever incumbency is accompanied by the implementation of unpopular policies (e.g. measures of economic austerity) or a departure from the programmatic platform over which a party was originally elected.

The strategic choices become more complex and the outcomes more uncertain if policy is incorporated in the model and acknowledged as a party goal on its own, rather than as an instrument for winning elections. As Strøm (1990: 574) argues, this is hardly a heroic assumption. Party leaders and high-ranking party officials are usually recruited from activists that can be assumed to be more concerned about policies than the average voter. The assumption that politicians value policy intrinsically does not preclude the fact that party leaders modulate their policies in order to maximise votes. Policy flexibility is a precondition for parties to appeal beyond limited segments of society and to cope with the constraints of holding office. However, prioritising votes over policy might result in alienating activists and ideologically committed voters. Conversely, a party that is too rigid or radical about its policy preferences will find itself in an unsuitable position to engage in catch-all strategies aiming at maximising votes. The resulting trade-offs between policy and votes as well as policy and office are at the core of the moderation thesis that assumes that parties featuring radical stances will downplay their positions when developing vote-maximising strategies and, a fortiori, when facing the constraints of incumbency. In his seminal study on the oligarchic tendencies of socialist and social democratic parties, Michels noted that membership expansion and vote maximisation resulted in a departure from principled politics (Michels 1911: 352–53 and passim). Schumpeter lends support to this hypothesis when noting that socialist parties forsook Marxist orthodoxy for electoral viability (Schumpeter 1942: 237–39). Similarly, incumbency has been shown to favour policy moderation within radical right and radical left parties (see for example Minkenberg 2001; March and Mudde 2005).

At the risk of making the analysis of party behaviour more complex, an additional dimension should be included. Rather than monolithic entities, political parties are complex actors (Scharpf 1997), whose actions result from interactions between individual and subordinated collective actors (Panebianco 1982: 14). For the purpose of parsimony, comparative analyses of party competition tend to focus on political parties as unitary actors. While recent scholarly research has begun to unveil the complex relations between intra-party conflict and electoral systems (Boucek 2009), party organisational reforms (Gauja and Almeida 2009) and coalition behaviour (Laver 1989; Laver and Shepsle 1996; Druckman 1996; Bäck 2008), the consequences of intra-party diversity on party competition remain largely unexplored within the field of comparative party politics.⁴

Political parties are first and foremost organisations comprising individuals whose priorities do not necessarily converge. Relaxing the assumption that parties are unitary actors allows for a more realistic analysis of the trade-offs political parties are confronted with when formulating and implementing strategies. This step has two important consequences on a general framework for the study of party behaviour. The first is...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Political parties and the politicisation of Europe
• 1. Approaches to the study of party responses to European integration
• 2. An acquired taste for Europe: Social democratic parties and European integration
• 3. Between reluctant Europeanism and hard Euroscepticism: Radical left parties and European integration
• 4. Separate ways: Liberal parties and European integration
• 5. Diluted Europeanism: Christian democratic parties and European integration
• 6. Europeanised Eurosceptics?: Radical right parties and European integration
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index