Organized by: Erica Edwards (UNC-CH), Liesbet Hooghe (UNC-CH), Gary Marks (UNC-CH), Moira Nelson (UNC-CH), David Scott (Virginia Commonwealth), Marco Steenbergen (UNC-CH), Milada Vachudova (UNC-CH)

The past decade has seen an explosion of research on the political implications of European integration for domestic political actors, including political parties. Yet there is little agreement on basic issues. Scholars disagree on how European integration affects the conventional dimensionality of political party competition in Europe. Some argue that European integration weakens the left/right dimension without fundamentally challenging existing party systems; others claim it creates or reinforces a second dimension of contestation; and still others discern possibilities for partisan re-alignment. There is little agreement on whether European integration is a source of volatility or stability in national party systems, and how one can explain territorial variation in party positioning or in the salience of European integration. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is no agreement on whether explanations formulated for West European party systems can be generalized to Central and Eastern Europe.

We wish to engage these debates in this workshop. Over the past decade, groups of scholars have compiled cross-national and national datasets on party positioning, party manifestoes, party-voter connections, party militants and party elites. So we have a wealth of data that we can bring to bear to advance our general understanding of the interaction between political parties and European integration.

This is a brainstorming workshop. We seek crossfertilization of theoretical and empirical work on political parties in Europe and beyond, with a central purpose: to understand the effect of European integration on national political party systems in East and West. We also want to use this meeting to define a research agenda for future meetings.

The workshop is concerned with three interconnected questions.

• How can we understand change in party systems? How, in particular, has European integration impacted national party systems? Does European integration limit the scope of party competition? Does it restructure competition?
• How can we explain party positioning across issues and across time? What can we learn from the study of political parties in domestic polities for party positioning on European integration?
• Can the experience of Western European political parties can be generalized to those in the new member states? Do territorial fault lines cross-cut the old/new member states, or do they coincide with this divide?

Each line of discussion engages variation among issues, change over time, and variation across territory.

Plan:
We conceive of three connected meetings. This first meeting on 23-24 April 2004 in Chapel Hill is exploratory. It will allow us to exchange ideas, frame questions, and define a research agenda with a view to establishing an interrelated set of topics on parties and European integration in East and West that will hold together as a co-edited volume or special journal issue. The format of the project follows several that have taken place under the auspices of the Center for European Studies at Chapel Hill. We have not asked participants to write full-fledged papers. Rather they have provided references to core readings, available on this website, which constitute the basis for discussion.