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1 Introduction
Nicolò Conti
The context of the volume
In the last decade, there has been a growing interest in understanding how parties influence the way Europe evolves as a political issue or even as an emerging cleavage (Kriesi 2007; Down and Wilson 2010), notably how parties structure domestic competition over European issues and how they mobilise sentiments in referenda over European integration (Marks and Steenbergen 2004). This interest has become even more salient after the failure of the referenda on the EU held in countries such as France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark and Ireland where not only the public, but also parties had often shown clear signs of disaffection for the EU. European issues have also become more salient after the outbreak of radical Eurosceptical parties in many member states. In the attempt to understand how parties structure patterns of contestation of the EU, the large-scale comparative literature has documented a cross-national tendency to structure party positions in a similar way (Marks and Steenbergen 2004). At the same time, however, other studies have shown some important differences across countries and geographic areas. Patterns of contestation of the EU are different in the old and in the new member states (Conti 2012). In the Nordic countries partisan Euroscepticism has always been persistent (Raunio 2008) and a mounting Euroscepticism has been documented in the new member states as well (Szczerbiak and Taggart 2002; Neumayer 2008). On the other hand, the South European member states have often been defined as a region where pro-European attitudes are exceptionally widespread and the symbiosis between integration, democratisation and modernisation was very effective in the eyes of domestic politicians and decision-makers (Conti et al. 2010), at least until the eruption of the economic crisis. It seems that the EU should produce a similar broad impact upon parties – consisting of a negative influence on parties’ relevance ‘in popular terms’ (Mair 1995: 46–7) since their capacity to process key issues and be leading agents of interest aggregation and political representation was undermined consequent to the process of European integration (Gaffney 1996; Bartolini 1998, 2005; Hix and Goetz 2000) – in reality parties respond differently across the member states. In the attempt to advance in our knowledge of a phenomenon – i.e. party attitudes to the EU – that is relevant not only for democratic competition but also for the future of Europe, our research investigates in-depth the national parties in ten countries: a sample meant as representative of the wider EU since it covers old and new member states and different EU regions.1
At a moment when the EU is facing an important number of challenges, and given that its legitimacy and democratic capacities are increasingly questioned (Eriksen and Fossum 2004; Leconte 2010), it seems particularly important to address questions of if, how and where parties want the EU to grow. Moving from these broad research questions, this volume intends to make a contribution in comparative terms to the ever-growing literature on party attitudes towards the EU (Marks and Steenbergen 2004; Szczerbiak and Taggart 2008). Furthermore, it intends to contribute to the development of the recent literature on Europeanisation of party politics (Kuhlaci 2012; Ladrech 2002; Mair 2006; Poguntke et al. 2007). The interest of our study is, in fact, twofold. First, we describe the attitudes of parties towards the EU in-depth for a sizeable group of member states. Second, we relate the explanatory factors of party attitudes in the analysed countries to the main theoretical arguments available in the literature. We refine the theoretical framework that has originated from the comparative literature with some original speculations, in light of some new evidence that we were able to produce with our enquiry. Third, we analyse features of Europeanisation of the party system by considering to what extent the issue of Europe has been internalised by the system and absorbed into the main patterns of party competition. In particular, the empirical analyses will attempt to answer the following questions. How is the EU depicted in the member states by parties? Can the EU rely on wide party consensus for its institutional performance and involvement in policy-making? Do projects of deeper integration find party support in the member states? Is there any identity issue that parties raise when they politicise the EU? Are these issues politically contested in the member states and, if so, what is the pattern of contestation they reflect?
To achieve our research goals, we analyse an original set of data that was collected within the broader large-scale undertaking of the INTUNE project.2 The main purpose of the project was to study the attitudes of several actors – elites, parties, masses, experts, media – towards the EU across several dimensions of the EU process. The theoretical foundations of this attempt originate from some recent reflections on the theme of citizenship and the EU. It is quite evident that over the last two decades the process of European integration has become more closely interwoven with the theme of citizenship. The fact that in the European treaties the concept of a European citizenship has received, starting with Maastricht, then with Amsterdam and Lisbon, an explicit mention and a precise legal definition is only the most visible and symbolic aspect of this trend. The fact that when citizens vote in EU referenda and in national and European elections they often express fears about the negative consequences of the EU process on their rights, duties, opportunities and constraints certainly is a more material aspect.
Citizenship developed within the national forms of political organisation with a multidimensional connotation, precisely under a horizontal and a vertical dimension (Cotta and Isernia 2009). Traditionally, the horizontal dimension has to do with the creation of a polity, thus with the definition of its membership. The second is instead related to the allocation of powers and responsibilities within the aforementioned polity. The horizontal meaning of citizenship rests, therefore, on a series of (ascribed and achieved) criteria through which one is, or becomes, a citizen – i.e. a full member of a polity – while the others, even if residents in the same territory, are considered part of the out-group of non-citizens. The vertical dimension concerns the citizens’ entitlement to the rights of control and influence over the political authorities, and the right to receive services, care and protection from the same authorities. This dimension is thus linked both to the authoritative structure of the polity and to its policy scope. Benhabib (2002a, 2002b) and Bartolini (2005: 211) maintain that these dimensions are rooted in the normative principles of democratic government, as they nurture the legitimacy and democratic quality of government at any level. The two authors also maintain that these dimensions, and therefore citizenship at large, are being substantially impacted by the EU process. With respect to the impact of the EU, the vertical and horizontal dimensions of citizenship also represent the focus of the analyses carried out by the INTUNE project. In this volume we present the results of the analyses on national parties, while other works document the findings on national elites (Best et al. 2012), citizens (Sanders et al. 2012a, 2012b) and media (Bayley and Williams 2012). The book builds on and further expands the special issue edited by Conti (2010), ‘Which Europe do Parties Want? A View from France, Italy, Portugal and Spain’. More countries are included in this new analysis and a larger time frame allows us to explore the most recent developments of contemporary times, and to refine the theoretical arguments that explain party attitudes to the EU. The research was funded by the INTUNE project; compared to the original group of scholars involved in the research more authors have joined the cooperative effort that made this book possible.
The method
Inspired by the above theoretical reflections, our main attempt was to move beyond the study of broad, or uni-dimensional, attitudes to the EU, in order to assess party attitudes across distinct (functional and symbolic) dimensions of citizenship. Particularly, research under the INTUNE project considers the horizontal dimension of citizenship as it is directly connected to the conceptual dimension of identity and the vertical dimension through the two dimensions of representation and policy scope. The national experts involved in the project carried a manifesto analysis – a methodology that is widely used to study party policy positions and issue preferences (Bara and Weale 2006; Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 1994; Gabel and Hix 2004; Laver 2001) – in order to describe party attitudes to the EU. Manifestos represent an extensive source of information with which to map the positions of parties across a large number of issues. Making use of a common coding scheme (see Appendix to the book), the national experts coded in particular the Euromanifestos that were issued by domestic parties to contest elections for the European Parliament (EP) extracting from the text the content analytic variables that can well describe their positions on a set of different EU issues across the above three dimensions. These documents do not have a focus as narrow or as specialised as other party documents (i.e. position papers on EU treaties, or parliamentary debates on ratification of EU legislation); on the contrary they are broad enough to represent an appropriate documentary source for the analysis of party preferences on the many faces of the EU process as studied by the INTUNE project.
We analysed a long period of time up to the most recent European elections of 2009, so we were also able to document change in party positions that was consequent to developments in treaty-making, enlargement, monetary unification and so on. Unfortunately, since our investigation ends in 2009, we were not able to fully document party attitudes after the economic crisis reached a peak in Europe. In the future, our method could be applied for the analysis of the Euromanifestos of the 2014 EP elections, in order to update the picture and to document change with even greater deepness. Furthermore, some time asymmetries have been introduced in the chapters in order to better represent the country-specific situations. To start with, since our analyses are based on Euromanifestos, in the new member states a systematic study of these documents could be carried only after their accession in the EU and participation to European elections (i.e. 2004 and 2009). In Italy the change in the party system was so ample over time that we opted for an accurate depiction of the main differences between the pre-and post-1994 systems and then we focussed on the most recent reality after the transitional years of the so-called Second Republic. For countries like Britain, although in the presence of a remarkable degree of continuity of the party system, a crucial swap in the attitudes towards Europe occurred between left and right in the long term, so it was important to document this path by extending the analysis to include a longer time frame. In spite of these time asymmetries, the chapters on the old member states all cover the period 1994–2009 and additionally they make reference to the period before when deemed relevant; chapters on the new member states refer to 2004–2009 but the analyses are complemented with narratives on the accession period as well.
The manifesto analysis allowed us to examine party positions beyond their salience in the public discourse. As a matter of fact, only some of the contents in the manifestos are actually salient in the discourse channelled through the media. This is the result of a process of selection of contents by the media that often inflates contentious issues over consensual ones, and uncomplicated issues over complex ones. Therefore, when mapping the positions of parties on complex multidimensional issues, the manifesto analysis allows remarkable levels of precision and depth that otherwise would not be allowed with the analysis of media discourse. For this reason, we do not make any assumption about the interest for such issues of any actor beyond parties, for example citizens certainly have more limited information about the specific aspects of EU integration. Our goal is instead to document party attitudes towards the EU based on original party sources such as manifestos, hence the results of our analyses cannot be extended to any other actor beyond parties here considered as unitary actors. Actually, we recognise that the party official stance is often different from the one of voters, and even of individual party members. To make some examples, we show that in the British case, in the 1980s the attitudes of the Conservative party towards Europe were milder than those of their leader Margaret Thatcher. Eventually, this disagreement contributed to the ejection of Thatcher by her own party, something that could well be anticipated by a careful reading of the conservative manifestos of the time. Furthermore, the manifestos of the Czech Civic Democrats reflect the stance of a less Eurosceptical party than is commonly perceived – overall they show a more balanced stance than the individual attitudes of some of their party leaders (often more prominent in the media). On the contrary, in the case of Berlusconi’s party in Italy, People of freedom, we could clearly trace the roots of a mounting Euroscepticism that for a long time has not been very evident in the media and that only recently has become more recognised.
The research on Euromanifestos that we present in this volume allows us, first, to assess whether parties formulate specific positions and preferences on the most particular aspects of the EU process. Second, it investigates whether their stance could be inserted into more pro-European, or more Eurosceptical attitudes. Third, it illustrates patterns of party contestation of the EU issues in the member states. These are the main descriptive goals of our work. Furthermore, it attempts to explain these patterns, in the light of the main theoretical arguments available in the literature and of some original proposals that we formulate in order to refine our understanding of the problem. Finally, our work contributes to enhancing knowledge about the mechanisms of the interaction between the EU and domestic politics in the member states, particularly from the point of view of the level of penetration and of the mechanics that EU issues play in party competition and programmatic supply.
Describing party attitudes
This volume has been structured as a set of country studies that all apply the same framework for analysis. I have already framed party attitudes towards the EU as the main problem that we investigate. Accordingly, we defined the dependent variables of our study as the party positions on a set of EU issues, along the three dimensions of identity, representation and policy scope. Finally, as I illustrate in the following section, from the most recognised explanatory arguments available in the literature and from the original conjectures advanced by the authors of the volume, I derive the independent variables whose impact we test in the chapters.
As it is typical of any empirical study based on content analysis, as this one is, a fundamental methodological problem concerns what should be observed. Many studies observe the salience of themes – usually measured through word, sentence or quasi-sentence counting – but then scholars face the problem of the low salience of themes that are too specific although important. Our purpose, instead, is precisely to document positions that are very specific and that refer to multiple dimensions of the EU process so, inevitably, they occupy only some limited sections of the Euromanifestos. At the same time, however, our analysed issues find an empirical equivalent in other studies. The overlapping will allow us to compare our results with those that have emerged from studies that have made use of different research techniques to analyse the attitudes of other actors towards specific aspects of the EU process, through use of elite (Best et al. 2012) and mass surveys (Sanders et al. 2012a, 2012b). Indeed, any analysis of the salience of our selected themes based on the more traditional techniques of salience measuring would result in small values and in very limited variations across cases. A solution would be to aggregate specific themes into broader macro-themes, a strategy adopted for example by Gabel and Hix (2004). It is one, however, that works against our efforts to analyse some of the most specific components of party attitudes to the EU. For this reason, the authors of this volume propose some alternative methodological approaches to analyse very specific textual information, regardless of the dedicated number of words. Making use of a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods we show that it is possible to make use of documents, such as party manifestos, to analyse even very specific party positions, an attempt otherwise addressed in the past by use of other techniques, such as a survey of politicians or an expert survey, that surely have points of strength but also some of weakness (Hooghe et al. 2004; Ray 1999).3
In their descriptive analyses, authors consider the level of relevance of EU issues in the different countries, whether parties contest and how parties divide upon such issues in their programmatic stance. Additionally, they document the consistency of party attitudes across different dimensions of the EU process. In order to assess the level of congruence of party at...
