Europeanising Party Politics?

Paul Lewis is Professor of European Politics at the Open University. Radoslaw Markowski is Director of the Polish National Election Study at the Institute of Political Studies, Polish Academy of Sciences.

The book is a comparative, empirically based study of party politics in contemporary Central and Eastern Europe that seeks to define the impact of European Union membership in this area. The question of Europeanisation has been intensively debated over recent years, but no firm conclusion has been reached. This collection of rigorously comparative contributions directs attention to a number of key areas in the attempt to isolate cases where Europe has made a difference.Successive chapters examine how new parties are managed by the state and the ways in which parties colonise the state itself, the role of transnational cooperation and the influence pan-European parties have on national organisations. The book goes on to consider patterns of party-oriented participation in the new democracies and dimensions of electoral turnout, dimensions of inter-party competition and identification of the specific features of post-communist party politics, examination of the key case of the extreme right and the conditions under which it tends to emerge, detailed analysis of the quality of political representation in the new democratic context, and discussion of how EU constraints are likely to undermine the prospects of stable party linkages. A conclusion seeks to establish how far Europe and EU policy has succeeded in influencing Central and East European developments.

1. Introduction: Europeanising party politics? Central and Eastern Europeafter EU enlargement, by Paul G. Lewis2. Party management and state colonisation in post-communist Europe:the European dimension, by Petr Kopecký and Maria Spirova3. Political parties and their consolidation in post-communist newdemocracies: indirect and direct impacts from EU enlargement, byGeoffrey Pridham4. Changing patterns of political participation, by Mitja Hafner-FinkDanica Fink-Hafner and Alenka KraSovec5. Voter turnout and electoral success of pro-European parties in postcommunist Europe, by Mikolaj Czesnik6. Patterns of party competition, by Zsolt Enyedi and Fernando CasalBértoa7. The radical right in post-communist Europe: comparative perspectiveson party competition, by Lenka Bustikova and Herbert Kitschelt8. The quality of social, partisan and governmental representation, byRadoslaw Markowski and Zsolt Enyedi9. (Shallow) Europeanisation and party system instability in postcommunist states: how changing constraints undermine thedevelopment of stable partisan linkages, by Robert Ladrech10. Conclusion, by Radoslaw Markowski