Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Though attention to multi-level governance in the European Union continues to grow, the regional governance side of the equation receives notably less attention than the national or European levels. While efforts to explain success of regional movements exist, the effects of European integration on regional movements, and regional political parties in particular, remain under-tested and under-theorized. In part to address this gap, I demonstrate that European integration affects regional political parties at both the entry and success stage. I test the hypothesis using a dataset of all regions within the EU-15 from 1950-1997 and demonstrate that a deeper EU has indeed encouraged more regional parties to compete in national elections. This paper clearly demonstrates that European integration has had a quite significant effect on internal domestic politics of the member states.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: European integration and ethno-regional mobilization have been considered as two of the most important forces that not only undermine state sovereignty but also disturb partisan coalitions within the member states of the European Union (EU). At first sight, these two seem to be incompatible in that the EU has tried to establish a new European identity against national or sub-national one, while ethnic leaders have criticized the intergovernmental decision making process of the EU that would block their participation further. Thus, it is not surprising that during the early EU history, leaders of ethnic parties had no sympathy on the European project. However, since the mid-1980s, most ethnic parties have shifted their anti-EU position by committing themselves to a deeper European integration, and in some regions, this change was followed by the electoral success of ethnic parties. Are the revitalization of the EU and the revival of ethnic parties just coincident? If not, what aspects of European integration benefit ethnic parties?; and how?
This paper presents an argument that as European integration deepens, the ethno-regional cleavage becomes more salient in elections and this change reinforces ethnic parties’ electoral power. Economic impact of European integration is a catalyst for such a change by promoting the formation of common regional interests that crosscut the traditional left-right ideological cleavage. Yet, the “multilevel” governance system of the EU that raises the status of regions and legitimizes political demands of regional autonomy is a more proximate cause for the rise of ethnic parties.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The relationship between European integration and regional parties is still a largely unexplored area of research. In other work, though, I find that European integration increases regional party success, at both the formation and national election stages. In this paper, I evaluate whether regional parties perform better as a result of deeper integration because they see the EU as an ally or an enemy. There are two plausible causal mechanisms to explain why regional parties perform better as the EU deepens. First, regional entities are more viable outside their traditional state structure due to the supranational structure of the EU, which allows them access to a larger market with less direct control than a traditional national government. On the other hand, regional movements may be threatened by the encroaching authority of Brussels. Regional political entrepreneurs may utilize these fears and anger towards European integration to mobilize support for their movements. Using expert surveys, I assess the views of regional parties on European integration and I find support for the viability hypothesis because regional political parties are consistently pro-European Union across time, space, and issue area. This research contributes directly to the multi-level governance literature, focusing on sub-national governance. Also, the findings on viability represent a direct test of and support for the optimal size of nations theory.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The European Union as a model of economic and political integration inspires political leaders across the globe. Yet, frequently, in drawing lessons from the European success story, the role in it of the democratic electoral competition gets overlooked. In this paper we identify the peculiar characteristics of electoral competition among major domestic political parties in the member states as one of the necessary conditions of the EU integration success, and argue for the inclusion in the analysis of integration variables that characterize the domestic party systems. It has been frequently argued that the success of the European integration is due to the fact that in most European countries a broad majority of the national decision-making elites in the government, state bureaucracy, major political parties, key interest groups, and the media favor the European integration. The commitment to integration among the elites was not shared to the same extent by the voters in most EU countries. Importantly, skeptical voters had little impact on the views of the major political parties. In most European countries, stable and consolidated national party systems were able to accommodate potentially divisive issues of the European integration by means of preserving a familiar pattern of electoral competition, and thus enabled the continued elite commitment to integration. In these countries, only on rare occasions do European issues become prominent during election campaigns, and even the elections to the European Parliament are dominated by the domestic issues. In the paper, we analyze the institutional conditions in stable European democracies that make it possible for major political parties to avoid competing on the integration dimension. Based on this analysis, we argue that nations lacking those institutional preconditions would also lack the ability to subdue a new distributive issue in their political process. Such an issue as the European integration would likely become the focus of electoral competition among political parties and materially weigh on the voters? choices in those countries. We identify characteristics of electoral competition among major domestic political parties in Europe as one of the necessary conditions of the EU integration success, and argue for the inclusion in the theoretical analysis of integration variables that characterize domestic party systems.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: We identify the pattern of competition among major domestic parties in Europe as an important condition of the EU integration success, and argue for the inclusion in the analysis of integration variables that characterize domestic party systems