Towards a True Party Democracy on European Level? Party Institutionalization of Europarties

With its mix of intergovernmental and supranational elements the EU in some way resembles a semi-democratic system. European politics are dominated by representatives of national political parties, yet ‘Europarties’ as transnational organizations of specific party families try to present themselves as one potential answer to the often proclaimed ‘democratic deficit’. For the first time in 2014 they advanced leading candidates for the European elections, who competed for the office of the European Commission president and, amongst other things, took the stage in a first ever Europeanwide TV debate. Observers judged this as a step in direction of a true party democracy on European level: externally parties gained visibility, internally they had to rethink processes of manifesto adaption as well as define rules to nominate and decide on candidates. Even if this model, after a successful first round in 2014, took a hit in 2019, when the new commission president did not come from the group of candidates, we assume that these changes imply a push for Europarties and their role in the EU. While the body of research on Europarties is growing, there are not many studies that focus on their organizational quality in itself. Applying a framework based on party institutionalization theory, this paper assesses the institutionalization process of the four major Europarties (EPP, PES, ALDE, Greens) since 2014. We devise an analytical framework with indicators combining external, internal and objective dimensions of party institutionalization. To empirically test our hypotheses, we make the case for a mixed-methods research design (network-analysis, content analysis) and utilize several distinct data sources for our analysis, which combine quantitative (election results, party websites, social media) and qualitative data (interviews with Europarty representatives).