Coping with Europe: EU Membership and Party System Change

How resistant are political parties and party systems in developed democracies to processes of economic and political integration that cross nation-state borders? This project considers the effect of European integration on party systems in EU member states by examining the relationships between parties and their voters, on the one hand, and the context and conditions of interaction between political parties, on the other. It hypothesizes and tests empirically that EU membership systematically affects fractionalization, volatility, and polarization in national party systems; it demonstrates that these effects pre-date the recent policitization of Europe in national politics; and it shows that party system change tends to happen incrementally over extended periods of time. In-depth case studies of Italy, the UK, and Portugal add important nuance to the results of large-N cross-national analyses. They confirm that national institutional contexts condition the affect of EU membership in meaningful ways, as they shape how voters engage with the issue of European integration and how parties respond to their concerns.