engleski

Europeanisation of Parties? Evaluating Policy Convergence and Divergence of Europarties' Members, 1979–2019

This paper assesses Europeanization of political parties on the programmatic level, measured through qualitative content analysis of party manifestos. In contrast to the Euromanifestos project, it looks at national manifestos (Manifesto Project, i.e. the CMP dataset) and tries to detect patterns of convergence and divergence in key policy areas among members of the four main European transnational party federations, i.e. Europarties (ALDE, EGP, EPP, and PES). Existing literature emphasizes that Europarties have become more diverse since the Eastern enlargements and speaks about the impact of Europarties on national parties in those member states. This paper wishes to expand on that and test for points of convergence and divergence both before and after the great enlargement in order to detect long-term trends. The analysis has shown that Europarties do possess a certain level of cohesiveness, yet that there are few trends to be observed and that the purported differences between parties from old and new member states cannot truly be detected. In addition, the levels of policy cohesiveness vary from issue to issue, with the lowest levels achieved on the (socio)economic axis of party competition.

Europeanization ; electoral manifesto ; policy convergence ; political party ; Europarties ; Manifesto Project ; CMP

nije evidentirano