Party Ideology and European Integration, Marks Et Al

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PARTY IDEOLOGY AND EUROPEANINTEGRATION:

An East-West Comparison

Gary MarksLiesbet HoogheErica EdwardsMoira Nelson

Department of Political ScienceUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

CB#3265, Hamilton HallChapel Hill, NC 27599-3265

Paper prepared for the UNC workshop on European integration and party system change,April 22-23, 2004.Please do not quote. This is an early draft for limited circulation. Comments welcome.


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How does the ideological profile of a political party in national politics constrain its support for

European integration?

Several research projects have found that the connection is powerful in the West. The

orientation of a party to issues arising from European integration can be predicted fairly

accurately if one knows how that party stands on the two dimensions that summarize domestic

political competitiona Left/Right dimension tapping support for social protection versus

market liberalism and a new politics dimension tapping environmentalism and libertarianism

versus traditional and national values.

In recent years, several researchers have explored the topic in the accession states of

Central and Eastern Europe. In this note, we draw on their research and evaluate the structure

of party support for European integration with an expert data set covering the EU-15 (minus

Luxembourg) and seven accession countries of Central and Eastern Europe (the Czech Republic,

Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia) plus Bulgaria and Romania.1

STRUCTURES OF PARTY COMPETITION

Two dimensions structure competition among political parties in western democracies

(Flanagan 1987). The first of these is an economic Left/Right dimension concerned with

economic redistribution, welfare, and government regulation of the economy. The Left side of

this dimension prioritizes economic equality; the Right prioritizes individual economic freedom.

Contestation on this dimension, expressed in democratic class conflict, dominated most

Western nations in the postwar period, and although it has weakened, this dimension remains a

1 To avoid repetition, we use the labels Central and Eastern Europe, East, and accession countriesinterchangeably, as we do Western Europe, West, and EU-15.


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powerful source of voting and party competition (Bartolini and Mair 1990; Lipset and Rokkan

1967).2

A second, non-economic or cultural, new politics dimension has gained strength since

the 1970s (Inglehart 1977; Kitschelt 1988; Franklin 1992). This dimension summarizes several

non-economic issuesecological, life-style, and communaland is correspondingly more

diverse than the Left/Right dimension. In some countries it captures conflict about traditional

values rooted in a secular/religious divide; in others, it is pitched around immigration and the

defense of national community; in yet others, it is oriented around environmental protection

and sustainable growth. We therefore describe the poles of this dimension with composite

terms: Green/Alternative/ Libertarian (or Gal) and Traditionalist/Authoritarian/Nationalist

(or Tan).3

In the West, there are strong affinities between Left and Gal and between Right and Tan.

The simple correlation between party positioning on these dimensions, represented in Figure 1,

is 0.65. When we divide the political world according to these dimensions into four quadrants,

we find that of 98 political parties across the 14 larger EU countries, only three are located in the

Left-Tan quadrant. Liberal parties are drawn to the Right-Gal quadrant, and they are joined there

by four additional parties. The remaining parties 83 parties are located in the Left-Gal and Right-

Tan quadrants.4

-- Figure 1 about here --

2 We chose the term dimensions rather than cleavage for reasons of consistency across Western and

Central and Eastern Europe. In the West, the Left/Right and Gal/Tan dimensions by and large conform tothe standard definition of a cleavage, as a combination of interest orientations rooted in social structure,cultural/ideological orientations rooted in the normative system, and behavioral patterns expressed inorganizational membership and action (Bartolini 2004: 3). However, the extent to which thesedimensions in the East meet these criteria is debated (Elster, Offe, and Preuss 1998: 247-70; Evans andWhitefield 1993; Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski, Toka 1999: 262-306; Kostelecky 2002: 90-136;Lawson, Roemmele, Karasimeonov 1999: 1-17; Zielinski 2002).3 Gender and color connotations intended!4 Criteria for party selection are set out in Appendix II.


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The same dimensions have been diagnosed in Central and Eastern Europe, but

placement of parties in this two-dimensional space could hardly be more different (Kitschelt

1992, 1995; Evans and Whitefield 1993). The Left-Gal quadrant encompasses just five political

parties, and these are located around its southern and eastern edges. 55 of 72 parties in the nine

countries for which we have data are either Left-Tan or Right-Gal. The association between the

two dimensions is 0.46. As one would expect given the relative newness of democratic

competition in the East, party competition is less structured there. But the structure we do find

yields an axis of party competition at a 90 degree angle to that in the West.


Another way of approaching this is to compare the positions of party families in East

and West on these dimensions. We do this in Figure 3. Party families are, of course, more

established in Western than in Central and Eastern Europe, but following Derksens

categorization (www.electionworld.org) and the affiliations of CEEC parties to European-level

party groups, we can place all but four parties in 11 party families. Party families in the East are

not as coherent on the Left-Right and Gal/Tan dimensions as those in the West, but the difference

is not large. In the East, the standard deviation on the Left-Right dimension within the Christian

democratic and confessional party families is much higher than in the West (more than half a

point greater on an eleven point scale); populist right, conservative, and social democratic party

families are slightly more diverse in the East, while liberal and radical left party families are

more coherent. The standard deviation on the Gal/Tan dimension is roughly the same among

party families in East and West.

-- Figure 3 about here

Several party familiessocial democrats, christian democrats, conservatives, liberals,

and regionalists/ethnic partieshave similar positions across East and West. Responsibility for


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the sharp, indeed 90 degree, difference in the axes of party competition can be pinned on large

divergences in the positions of the four party families in the Left-Tan quadrant: the extreme left,

confessional, agrarian, and populist-right families.5 The arrows in Figure 3 join mean positions

of these four families, East and West. The ovals in Figure 3 encompass the mean positions of the

main party families, of which are all similarly located in this two dimensional space. From this

perspective, the source of the divergence between East and West appears to be the communist

legacy, which serves as an ideological magnet in the extreme lower-left corner of Figure 3 for

those parties that wish to blunt reform.

PARTY POSITIONING ON EUROPEAN INTEGRATION IN WESTERN EUROPE

The general structuring of party competition allows one to explain party positioning on

European integration with remarkable precision. But the predictive power of Left/Right and

Gal/Tan varies across East and West. We begin with the West, where European integration has

been on the political agenda for decades, and where we have a decade-long research program to

draw upon.

The inverted U-curve

The relationship between Left/Right position and general support for European

integration in the West is most accurately described as an inverted U-curve. Centrist parties

tend to support European integration; opposition parties on both left and right extremes tend to

oppose (Aspinwall 2002; Hix and Lord 1997; Marks, Wilson, and Ray 2002; Taggart 1998).

5 As Figure 3 suggests, the term populist-right is a misnomer as applied to left-leaning Tan parties inCentral and Eastern Europe. We describe them here as populist-Tan parties.


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The European Union is a centrist project. It has been created by mainstream parties

Christian democrats, liberals, social democrats and conservativeswhich have dominated

national governments, national parliaments, the European Parliament, and the European

Commission. Parties on the ideological extremes attack European integration as an extension of

their domestic opposition. The extreme left views European integration as an elitist capitalist

project, which isolates decision making from citizens in the interests of powerful corporations.

The populist right views European integration as an elitist supranational project, which

weakens national autonomy and traditional values.

Left/Right

The connections between domestic and European contestation come into sharp view

when one disaggregates European integration into its component issues. The Left/Right

dimension constrains party positioning on European issues having to do with the political

regulation of the market. According to the regulated capitalism vs. market liberalism model

(Hooghe and Marks 1999), the center-left supports political integration in order to create the

capacity to regulate markets, redistribute resources, and sustain partnership among public and

private actors. The project of regulated capitalism at the European level is rooted in Jacques

Delors decade-long presidency of the European Commission (1985-1994), and his effort to build

an espace organisaround social policy, employment policy, and cohesion policy. Regulated

capitalism is an ideological projectand is opposed by those on the right who consider market

integration a worthy goal, rather than a point of departure for further integration.

The location of Western national political parties on the Left/Right divide constrains

whether they support or oppose EU policies related to regulated capitalism (Hooghe, Marks,

and Wilson 2004; Thomassen and Schmitt 1997: 172). Employment policy is a prime example.


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The further to the left, the greater is a partys support for a European employment policy

(R=0.53).6 The sign is reversed when one examines political parties stance on the internal

market: Left/Right positioning is linearly and positively associated with support for the internal

market (R=0.34). This reflects principled opposition to the market project among extreme left

parties, and greater enthusiasm among center-right than among center-left parties.7

New Politics

EU issues that engage life style, gender, environment, participatory decision making,

and national culture are most closely associated with the new politics dimension. The location

of a party on the new politics dimension is strongly correlated with the level of its support for

an EU environmental policy (R=0.62), for an EU asylum policy (R=0.46), and for

strengthening the powers of the European Parliament (R=0.50).

In some respects, the new politics dimension is more intimately connected to European

integration than is the Left/Right dimension. Those on the Tan (Traditional/Authoritarian

/Nationalist)side oppose European integration for essentially the same reasons that they

oppose immigration: both infuse foreigners into the society; both threaten the national

community. The Vlaams Bloks campaign slogan in the 2003 Belgian elections was Safe

Flanders and the central plank of the party platform was opposition to immigrant voting

6 In this and following analyses, we weigh party positions by the percentage of votes a party receives inthe national election prior to the time point of the survey. Our results are robust across weighted and

non-weighted analysis, and we choose the former because we assume that larger parties will have alarger impact on the structure of competition.7 Historically, socialist democrats have fought for stronger state authority to counter-balance concentratedprivate ownership. However, they are loath to replicate this national strategy at the European level. Onereason is that social democrats are inclined to defend the national institutions they have done so much tocreate. Many social democrats have come to the conclusion that the EU is biased towards negativeintegration, that is, towards market-creating and market-enabling policies, rather than market-regulation(Scharpf 1996, 1999). Hence, the Left/Right divide does not speak plainly to the territorial allocation ofauthority.


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rights; in the 1999 Belgian and European elections, it was In charge of our own country, an

update on its earlier Our own people first. In the run-up to the 2004 European elections, the

Vlaams Blok supports an intergovernmental EU and is opposed to European citizenship and

a European Constitution as proposed by the European Convention. Only states can decide who

their subjects are. The EU is no state and should never become one. (http://Vlaamsblok.be).

The defense of national sovereignty lies close to the heart of those on the Tan side of this divide,

not because national sovereignty is useful for other ends, but because it is intrinsically valued.

This distinguishes the populist right from market liberals on the conventional right.

Market liberals view national sovereignty in terms of its implications for economic exchange.

They are opposed to barriers to trade, and they therefore support strong international regimes

that can facilitate market integration, even if this eliminates key national competencies,

including monetary control.

A partys new politics position is considerably more powerful than its position on the

Left/Right dimension in predicting position on integration across issue areas. Figure 4 plots the

bivariate correlation of position on a policy with Left/Right and Gal/Tan for nine policies.

Except for the internal market and for cohesion policy, Gal/Tan is a better predictor of a partys

position than Left/Right.


Populist right parties are now by far the most Euro-skeptical party family group in the

West, including the extreme Left: their average position on European integration is 2.5 on a 7-

point scale, against 3.3 for extreme Left parties, and 5.6 for all Western parties. Conservative

parties that lean to the Tan side of the new politics dimension tend to be more Euro-skeptical

than those that do not. While Tan values are a strong indicator of Euro-skepticism, Gal values

are consistent with support for European integration. Support is especially strong for issues that


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relate directly to core concerns of Gal-oriented parties. Thus green parties are now the most

Euro-enthusiastic party family in the West for EU environmental policy, and more powers to

the European Parliament.

PARTY POSITIONING ON EUROPEAN INTEGRATIONIN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE

No Inverted U-Curve

Table 1 examines the extent to which the basic dimensions of contestation constrain

party positioning on European integration in East and West. Left/Right, Gal/Tan, and

extremism on both dimensions explain 72 percent of the variance in general party support in

the East and 57 percent in the West. This does not change materially when we delete controls

for the participation of a party in government and the size of its electoral support.8

These dimensions are far more powerful constraints on party positioning than national

location. Anova analysis of general support for European integration using national dummy

variables explains 8.6 percent of variance among parties in the East, and 10.4 percent in the

West. With respect to European integration one can say that political parties are much more

diverse within than among countries.9

-- Table 1 about here --

Party positioning in accession states is highly structured, even by comparison to the EU-

15. The most powerful predictors in the East are the linear variables Left/Right and Gal/Tan. If

one knows only where a party stands on these two dimensions, one can account for 61 percent

8 The respective figures for explained variance are 69 percent for the East, and 55 percent for the West.9 The standard deviation of party positions, on European integration, as on Left/Right and Gal/Tan, tendsto be considerably larger within individual countries than within individual party families. However, amodel using Left/Right and Gal/Tan captures almost as much variation in the West, and more variation inthe East, than one using party families, and is more parsimonious.


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of the variance in positioning on European integration across Central and Eastern European

parties. The corresponding figure is just 27 percent in the EU-15 minus Luxembourg. In the

East, a one point shift on the 11-point Left/Right scale moves a party 0.43 on the 7-point scale for

general support for European integration, holding its position on Gal/Tan at the population

mean. A one point shift on the 11-point economic Gal/Tan scale moves a party 0.46 on general

support for European integration, holding Left/Right at the mean.

Correspondingly, extremism, measured by squaring the distance from the median party

on Left/Right and Gal/Tan, is much less potent in Central and Eastern Europe than in Western

Europe. As Table 1 shows, coefficients for extremism are weaker in the East than in the West,

and this difference is robust across all model specifications with the variables in Table 1. To

summarize: the positioning of political parties on European integration is more structured in

the East, and it is structured disproportionately by two linear variables: Left/Right and Gal/Tan.

The inverted-U, a familiar construct in the West, is absent in the East.

Left/Right and Gal/Tan

The dimensions laid out in Figure 2 powerfully constrain party positioning on European

integration in Central and Eastern Europe. European integration fits quite neatly onto the axis

of party competition in Figure 2. The reasons for this take one to the heart of party competition

in accession countries.

Attitudes to the communist past and economic experience of transition underpin the

preponderance of parties in the Left-Tan and Right-Gal quadrants. Transition losers hark back

to an idealized version of their communist past, where egalitarianism epitomized an important

aspect of [their] interests, and support for the authoritarian and paternalistic state was a means

to get these interests fulfilled (Bernik and Malnar 2003: 201; Tverdova and Anderson 2003; see


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also Meyer 2003). Economic egalitarianism, authoritarianismand opposition to European

integrationgo hand in hand. Transition winners, in contrast, repudiate authoritarianism

and egalitarianismand support European integrationprecisely because they seek a clean

break with the past. So, for example, the Polish Alliance of the Democratic Left (SLD), founded

on the ruins of the discredited Polish communist party, enthusiastically embraces entry into the

EU to demonstrate its repudiation of the past (Pienkos 2004: 464).

This structure is reinforced by the formal requirements imposed by the European Union

on candidate countries. The European Unions Copenhagen criteria require both a market

economy and institutional guarantees for transparent democracy and minority protection

(Vachudova forthcoming)in short, policies associated with the Right-Gal quadrant of Figure 2.

As Karen Henderson observes, the EU makes demands of candidate states which coincide with

the aims of parties at the pro-market libertarian end of the axis . . . (Henderson 2001: 10). These

EU conditions are resisted by parties in the Left-Tan quadrant, which defend the recent past, but

Right-Gal parties welcome them because they place their countries back on the path they would

have taken were it not for Soviet domination.

Socio-economic interests appear to reinforce this structure. Analyses of voting in the

accession referenda confirm that those who voted in favor are disproportionately better

educated, professional, and have higher incomes than those who voted against (Pienkos 2004:

469). European integration gains the support of economic winners, who tend to support Right-

Gal parties (Chicowski 2000; Tucker, Pacek, Berinsky 2002). European integration provokes

skepticism among economic losers, and such people tend to support radical left and populist

right parties in the Left-Tan quadrant. In Poland, opponents of European integration support the

Peasants Self-Defense party headed by Andrej Lepper, or the Catholic, nationalistic, League of

Polish Families, with its close association to the Catholic fundamentalist radio stationMarya


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(Szczerbiak 2001). In Hungary, Euroskepticism has established roots in the populist-right as

well as the former communist left: the far right Justice and Life Party and the far left Hungarian

Workers Party are hard-core Euro-skeptic parties (Taggart and Szczerbiak 2004). Similarly, in

Slovakia, opposition against European integration is pronounced among the populist-right

(Slovak National Party, and the Right Slovak National Party) and the radical left (Slovak

Communist Party).10 All but one of 13 Euroskeptic parties (i.e. those scoring below 4 on our 7-

point scale for general support of European integration) are located in the Left-Tan quadrant of

Figure 2. The sole exception is the Czech ODS, the Civic Democratic Party of former Prime

Minister Vaclav Klaus, which is located in the Right-Gal quadrant, and is moderately Euro-

skeptical.11

The difference between East and West can be summarized in terms of the location of the

main axis of party competition and the extent to which orientations to European integration

track on to it. In the East, European integration is assimilated onto the dominant Right-Gal, Left-

Tan axis of competition. In the West, general support for European integration is only weakly

related to the Left-Gal, Right-Tan axis. Figure 5 illustrates the contrast between a linear East and

a curvilinear West.


In the West, the economic right contains neo-liberal parties that favor the market

oriented reforms that have been the main thrust of European integration. But there are also

right-populist parties on the economic right that oppose loss of national sovereignty, even on

10 The remaining Euro-skeptic parties in our survey are the far-right Party of Great Romania, two far-rightLithuanian parties (Lithuanian Freedom Union, and Young Lithuania), the nationalist Slovenian NationalParty, one agrarian party (Lithuanias Peasants Party) and the Communist party in the Czech Republic.11 It is worth noting that Klaus Euro-skepticism is rooted in his neo-liberal opposition to particularpolicies, such as agricultural and cohesion policy, rather than in generalized disapproval of the processitself. This is to say that the ODS unbundles European integration, as do conservative parties in the West.


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economic policy. The former parties are defined primarily by their right-wing market

friendliness; the latter parties by their Euroskeptical nationalism. So when it comes to Europe,

there is palpable tension between the economic Right and Tan. Right-populist parties disagree

vehemently with Christian democratic parties. Conservative parties are rift between

nationalists and neoliberals (Alexandre and Jardin 1997; Baker et al. 1999; Marks and Wilson

2000).

In Western Europe, the Left is also split on the issue of European integration.

Mainstream social democratic parties wish to deepen the European Union to better regulate

market outcomes, and to anchor Gal values in European society. Radical left parties, in contrast,

are driven by anti-capitalism to principled Euro-skepticism.

European integration fits hand in glove with the Left-Tan/ Right-Gal axis in Central and

Eastern Europe, and this explains why positioning on European integration is more structured

in the East than in the West. In Western Europe, by contrast, European integration highlights

tensions in the dominant Left-Gal/Right-Tan axis of party competition, and this limits the extent

to which political parties can absorb European integration into the existing structure of party

competition.

Issue bundling

It is one thing for a party to take a position on European integration on the outside, as

the political parties in the East have done. It is another thing for a party to take a position from

the inside, confronted with decisions on whether and how to pursue integration on several

fronts, as has been the situation for political parties in the West.

From the outside, European integration is likely to be perceived as a bundle, a take-it-or-

leave-it proposition on membership. This is exactly what we seem to find in Central and Eastern


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Europe. Here, contestation reflects basic differences in world viewwhether a party desires

cosmopolitan opening or national closure (Batory 2001: 6). European integration is a litmus

test for distinguishing among those whose sense of vision is stuck in the past or looking

forward to the future (Henderson 2001: 16).

Smer, founded in Slovakia in 1999 as a social democratic party embracing a Blairite third

way, defends its pro-accession stance in terms of a European system of values (Dauderstdt

and Joerissen 2004: 12). In its website, the orthodox communist KSS defends a diametrically

opposite view, not because it protests against particular policies, but on the basis of its claim

that capitalism has been worse than socialism for Slovakia (Dauderstdt and Joerissen 2004: 13).

The same tension characterizes the EU debate in Hungary. Asked what kind of European

Union Hungary hopes for, the EU Integration website (of the Hungarian Socialist party, the

MSzP) answerswithout coming up with constructive ideas which actually might have to be

implementedthat Hungary wants an efficient, transparent, and open EU (Dauderstdt and

Joerissen 2004: 18). The party explains that In the view of the Socialists, there is no other way of

modernization for Hungary and more broadly Central Europe than joining the process of

European integration as soon as possible, voluntarily giving up part of sovereignty and

transferring that to the institutions of European integration (quoted in Batory 2001: 19).


Figure 6 confirms that, in the accession countries, support and opposition to specific EU

policies is uni-dimensional. A partys general support for European integration is strongly

constrained by its position on Left/Right and Gal/Tan (R=0.52 and 0.65, respectively), and far

more so than in the West (R=0.04 and R=0.30). What varies across the policies illustrated in

Figure 6 is the extent to which Left/Right and Gal/Tan constrain party positioning. What does not

vary is the relative influence of Left/Right and Gal/Tan. As one would expect, policies that escape


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the clutches of these dimensions include those that mainly involve inter-state, rather than intra-

state, transfers (agricultural policy and cohesion policy).12

The contrast between the patterns in Figures 4 and 6 is precisely what one would expect

if European integration was bundled in the East and disaggregated in the West. In the West,

when a political party takes a position on EU employment, EU environment, or the European

internal market, it considers the particular costs or benefits of these policies. For policies that

engage domestic economic redistribution, this evaluation is determined mostly by a partys

Left/Right leanings; for policies that involve national authority it is determined mostly by a

partys Gal/Tan position.

CONCLUSION

In this proto-paper we find that the structure of party competition in domestic politics does

indeed constrain the positions that parties take on European integration. In the West, party

positions on a range of EU policies can be explained by some combination of Left/Right

positioning and Gal/Tan positioning. In the East, we find that party positioning on European

integration is closely tied to the main axis of party competition, running from the pro-

integration Right-Gal quadrant to an anti-integration Left-Tan quadrant.

We suggest that the axis of competition in Central and Eastern Europe reflects the

attraction of the Left-Tan extreme for parties in four families: the extreme left, confessional,

agrarian, and populist-right. The reason why parties tend to track on this axis in supporting or

opposing European integration appears to be that they view European integration as a policy

package. Once these Central and Eastern European countries become members, the logical

12 Perhaps the weak influence of Left/Right and Gal/Tan over environmental policy and employmentpolicy is explained by the fact that support for these regulated capitalism policies does not fit nicely in theRight-Gal quadrant.


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implication is that party positioning on European integration will become more differentiated,

and in this respect more like that in the West.

We describe and theorize highly aggregate patterns in party positioning. Central and

Eastern Europe and Western Europe appear to exhibit a set of explicable differences. However,

we should emphasize that the approach we take here is complementary to one that gains

validity (perhaps at some cost to generality) by staying closer to the data, for example, by

examining a particular party system or type of party.


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FIGURE 1DIMENSIONS OF PARTY COMPETITION IN WESTERN EUROPE


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FIGURE 2DIMENSIONS OF PARTY COMPETITION IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE


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FIGURE 3PARTY FAMILIES AND DIMENSIONS OF PARTY COMPETITION

IN EAST AND WEST

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10

8

6

4

2

0

East

West

centrist

agrarian

confessional

no family

regionalist/ethnic

radical-left

social democratic

christian democratic

liberal

conservative

populist-right

agrarian

confessionalno family

regionalist/ethnic

green

radical-leftsocial democratic

christian democratic

liberal

conservative

populist-right

Left/Right

Tan/Gal


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FIGURE 4DIMENSIONS OF PARTY COMPETITION AND EU POLICIES:

WESTERN EUROPE

Left/Right

.8.6.4.20.0-.2-.4-.6-.8

Gal/Ta

n

.8

.6

.4

.2

0.0

-.2

-.4

-.6

-.8

agriculture

internal market

GENERAL POSITION

foreign policy

cohesion

employment

environment

EP powers

enlargement

asylum


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FIGURE 5LEFT/RIGHT AND GENERAL POSITION ON EUROPEAN INTEGRATION:

EAST AND WEST

Note: Unweighted positioning for 98 parties in the West and 73 parties in the East. Data fromthe 2002 Chapel Hill survey on party positioning.

Left/Right

1086420

Position

onEuropeanintegration

7

6

5

4

3

2

1

West

East


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Figure 5:

Mapping Policy Positions on Left/Right and Gal/Tan: The East

Left/Right

.8.6.4.2-.0-.2-.4-.6-.8

Gal/Tan

.8

.6

.4

.2

0.0

-.2

-.4

-.6

-.8

agriculture

environment

cohesion

employment

asylum

EP powers

foreign policy

GENERAL POSITION

enlargement

internal market

Left/Right

FIGURE 6DIMENSIONS OF PARTY COMPETITION AND EU POLICIES:

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE


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Table 1:West vs. East: Left/Right, Gal/Tan and Party Position on European

Integration

West East

Correlation OLS Correlation OLS

Left/Right position .23 .30***(.064)

.68 .32***(.062)

Gal/Tan .25 .44***(.059)

.69 .29***(.062)

Left/Right extremism .46 .15***(.024)

.33 .046(.023)

Gal/Tan extremism

.26

.08***(.022)

.33

.068**(.023)

Government participation .21 .247(.253)

.31 .301(.239)

Electoral vote .25 .012(.009)

.26 .018(.010)

R2 .57 .72

Note: OLS analyses for political parties that obtained votes in the most recent national election thatpreceded the survey (2002 or earlier). Entries for the OLS column are unstandardized coefficients

with standard errors in brackets. The number of parties is 98 for the West, and 73 for the East.Significance levels: *** p


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Appendix I: Description of the variables

Position on Europeanintegration

Average score of country experts for each political party. Question: Howwould you describe the general position on European integration thatthe partys leadership has taken over the course of 2002? For each partyrow, please place an X on the number that corresponds best to yourview. Experts place parties on a 7-point scale ranging from 1 (stronglyopposed to European integration) over 4 (neutral to European integration)to 7 (strongly in favor of European integration).

Left/Right position Average score of country experts for each political party. Question:Political scientists often classify parties in terms of their ideological stanceon economic issues. Parties to the right emphasize a reduced economicrole for government. They want privatization, lower taxes, less regulation,reduced government spending, and a leaner welfare state. Parties to theleft want government to play an active role in the economy. Using thesecriteria, indicate where parties are located in terms of theireconomicideology. Experts place parties on an 11-point scale that ranges from 0(Extreme left) over 5 (Center) to 10 (Extreme right).

Gal/Tan position Average score of country experts for each political party. Question: Partiesmay also be classified in terms of their views on democratic freedomsand rights. Libertarian or post-materialist parties favor expandedpersonal freedoms, for example, access to abortion, doctor-assistedsuicide, same-sex marriages, and greater democratic participation.Traditional or authoritarian parties often reject these ideas; theyvalue order and stability, and believe that the government should be a firmmoral authority. Where are parties located in terms of theirideologicalviews on freedoms and rights? Experts place parties on an 11-pointscale that ranges from 0 (Libertarian/ Postmaterialist) over 5 (Center) to10 (Traditional/ Authoritarian).

Left/Right extremism Calculated as the squared distance from the median Left/Right position inthe subgroup. Medians are calculated for the West and the Eastseparately.

Gal/Tan extremism Calculated as the squared distance from the median Gal/Tan position inthe subgroup. Medians are calculated for the West and the Eastseparately.

Government participation A dichotomous variable whereby a political party receives a value of 1when it was in office at the time of the survey (2002), and 0 otherwise.Source: http://www.electionworld.org

Electoral vote Percentage of the vote received by a political party in the nationalparliamentary elections in the year of evaluation (2002) or the most recentyear prior to that time point. Where the electoral vote refers to thecombined vote of a coalition of parties, we redistribute the votes acrosscoalition partners proportionate to the proportion of parliamentary seatsthat individual parties in a coalition occupy.Source: http://www.electionworld.org


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Appendix II

The analysis undertaken in this research note is based on a dataset gathered under the auspices

of the UNC-Chapel Hill Center for European Studies. An expert survey conducted in 2002 by a

team of faculty and graduate students13 asks country experts to evaluate the positions of

national political parties on European integration on a 7-point scale, whereby the lowest score

(1) represents strong opposition to European integration and the highest score (7) indicates

strong support for European integration. 238 country experts reporting on their country of

expertise evaluated the positions of 171 political parties in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic,

Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and all EU member states

except Luxembourg. There were fewer than 5 expert responses from Estonia, and the country

was therefore deleted.

The survey replicates and expands an expert survey of party positioning on European

integration conducted in 1999 by the UNC-Center for European Studies, and in 1996 by Leonard

Ray for four different time points: 1984, 1988, 1992, and 1996 (http://www.unc.edu/~gwmarks;

Ray 1999). Both of these surveys were limited to Western EU member states.

Three sets of questions in the 2002 survey attempt to illuminate policy positions, internal

party dissent, as well as dimensions of contestation. First are a set of questions that tap the

degree of support across parties for European integration in general and in the following policy

areas: EU environmental policy, EU cohesion or regional policy, EU policy towards asylum

seekers, EU employment policy, EU agricultural spending, internal market, EU foreign and

13 Liesbet Hooghe, Milada Vachudova, Erica Edwards, Moira Nelson, Gary Marks, Marco Steenbergen,and David Scott.


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security policy, expanding the European parliaments power, and EU enlargement.14 Secondly

are two questions that tap extent of dissent within parties, as well as on type of issues. Third are

questions that tap party positions on basic dimensions of political contestation, including an

economic left/right scale and a new politics scale.15

Political parties are included in the survey if they fulfill one or more of the following

criteria:

The party received three percent or more of the vote in the general election for the lowerchamber in 2002 or the most proximate prior year.

The party was represented in the lower chamber of the legislature in 2002. The party was represented in the European Parliament in 2002.

238 carefully selected individuals with recognized expertise on the political parties in a

particular country (normally, but not always, their country of citizenship) completed a detailed

questionnaire evaluating the positions taken by political parties on various issues arising from

European integration, the extent to which they exhibited internal division, and their location on

basic dimensions of contestation.16 Our estimate of each partys position on each of these

questions is the mean of the country experts evaluations.

The extent to which expert evaluations are reliable can be gauged by examining the

mean standard deviations. Table 2 presents standard deviations in responses to two key

14 For example, the item for cohesion policy is as follows:Now consider EU cohesion or regional policy (e.g. the structural funds). Some political parties wish to

maintain or expand the EUs cohesion policy, whereas others wish to reduce or eliminate it. Where doesthe leadership of the following parties stand?15 For example, the item for left-right position is as follows:Political scientists often classify parties in terms of their ideological stance on economic issues. Parties tothe right emphasize a reduced economic role for government. They want privatization, lower taxes, lessregulation, reduced government spending, and a leaner welfare state. Parties to the left want governmentto play an active role in the economy. Using these criteria, indicate where parties are located in terms oftheir economic ideology.16 Three respondents submitted invalid responses.


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questions, and suggests that the current survey is within range of the Ray data. As Ray notes,

standard deviations in his 1984-1996 data are comparable to those of the Huber and Inglehart

(1995) and Laver and Hunt (1992) data sets (Ray 1999).

Table 2. Mean standard deviations of expert evaluations

Mean standard deviations

1984 1988 1992 1996 2002

Party position onintegration

0.97 0.90 0.82 0.82 0.46

Salience of issue 0.75 0.75 0.69 0.70 0.23

Documents

Party Ideology and European Integration, Marks Et Al