Politicising Europe in National and European Elections

Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a burgeoning literature on the politicization of Europe. Inspired by post-functionalist integration theory, this literature shows that there has been a substantial amount of politicization of European issues in national integration debates, national election campaigns and national parliamentary debates. Nevertheless, there is a strong focus on the national level, whereas the supranational level has been rather neglected so far. Against this background, our panel brings together scholars with a particular interest in exploring politicisation from a more “European” perspective. Accordingly, we discuss papers with two different foci: On the one hand, we aim to scrutinize the context sensitivity of the above mentioned findings. We encourage scholars to take into account in particular European elections (i.e. elections to the European Parliament). On the other hand, we are interested in comparisons between the national and the European level in the context of EU politicization.