Finally Moving? Party Europeanisation and the Differentiated Politicisation of European Integration

Despite their crisis and decline in the last decades, political parties remain the essential link between citizens and government in modern parliamentary democracies. Especially in the EU multilevel setting, they play the vital role of upholding the democratic chain of delegation. This has long raised expectations about the organisational adaptation of party organisations to European integration, or ‘party Europeanisation’. Yet studies conducted in the early 2000s found little to no evidence of such an organisational adaptation, citing the lack of incentives, and more generally, the lack of the politicisation of European integration, for parties’ resistance to change. However, since the failure of the Constitutional Treaty, attention for and interest in the ‘politicisation of European integration’ has resurfaced, raising the question of whether party Europeanisation is finally moving in its wake. In this article, we review the evidence for both evolutions and outline a research agenda to connect these differentiated phenomena theoretically