Please go to methodology for more papers on political parties

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Double special issue on "Understanding Euroscepticism", in Acta Politica (Spring 2007), edited with Liesbet Hooghe.

2007. Table of contents

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2006. Party Ideology and European Integration: An East/West: Different Structure, Same Causality, with Liesbet Hooghe, Moira Nelson and Erica Edwards. Comparative Political Studies 39 (2), 155-75.

"With the accession of eight former communist countries in May 2004 Europe has been stitched back together. What is the character of political conflict in an enlarged European Union, and how does the ideological profile of a party constrain its support on European integration? We seek to shed light on this question with a new expert data set on party positioning on European integration for 171 political parties in 23 countries. We find that the structure of domestic competition differs radically in East and West, but that, with respect to European integration, the same causality is at work: parties’ positions on European integration are systematically related to their positions on domestic conflict. But the substantive connection could not be more different. In the West, the two main sources of opposition to European integration—the hard left, and the hard right, are at opposite ends of the axis of domestic party competition. In the East, opposition is located at one end of the axis, among parties sympathetic to the communist legacy of economic egalitarianism and authoritarianism."

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2004. Does Identity or Economic Rationality Drive Public Opinion on European Integration? with Liesbet Hooghe. PS: Political Science and Politics 37, 3: 415-420.

This is an accessible summary of why and how identity shapes attitudes over Europe.

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2004. European Integration and Political Conflict: Citizens, Parties, Groups, co-edited with Marco Steenbergen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 280 pp.

Table of Contents

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2006. Calculation, Community, and Cues: Public Opinion on European Integration, with Liesbet Hooghe, European Union Politics 6 (4): 421-45.

"This article summarizes and extends the main lines of theorizing on public opinion on European integration. We test theories of economic calculus and communal identity in a
multi-level analysis of Eurobarometer data. Both economic calculus and communal identity are influential, but the latter is stronger than the former. We theorize how the political
consequences of identity are contested and shaped – that is to say, politically cued – in national contexts. The more national elites are divided, the more citizens are cued to
oppose European integration, and this effect is particularly pronounced among citizens who see themselves as exclusively national. A model that synthesizes economic, identity,
and cue theory explains around one-quarter of variation at the individual level and the bulk of variation at the national and party levels."

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2002. Understanding Political Contestation in the European Union, with Marco Steenbergen, Comparative Political Studies 35: 8 (October), pp. 879-892,

"For the past 50 years, the European Union (EU) and its predecessors (the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community) have helped shape the politics of constituent countries. In the era following the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the EU has been transformed into a multilevel polity in which European issues have become important not just for the governments of EU member states but also for citizens, political parties, and political groups within those states. How, if at all,
has this affected political contestation in and about the EU? This is the question that this special issue addresses."

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2002. Does Left/Right Structure Party Positions on European Integration? With Liesbet Hooghe and Carole J. Wilson, Comparative Political Studies, 35: 8 (October), pp. 965-989.

"How is contestation on European integration structured among national political parties? Are issues arising from European integration assimilated into existing dimensions of domestic
contestation? We show that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left/right
dimension and party positioning on European integration. However, the most powerful source of variation in party support is the newpolitics dimension, ranging from Green/alternative/libertarian to Traditional/authoritarian/nationalist."

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2002. National Political Parties and  European Integration, with Carole Wilson and Leonard Ray, American Journal of Political Science 46:3 (July), pp. 585-594.

"We test competing explanations for party positioning on the issue of European integration over the period 1984 to 1996 and find that the ideological location of a party in a party family is a powerful predictor of its position on this issue, and that this is a stronger influence than strategic competition, national location, participation in government, or the position of a party's supporters. We conclude that political parties have bounded rationalities that shape how they process incentives in competitive party systems. Political cleavages give rise to ideological commitments or “prisms” through which political parties respond to new issues, including European integration."

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2000. The Past in the Present: A Theory of Party Response to European Integration, with Carole Wilson, British Journal of Political Science 30 (July), pp. 433-459.

This article explains the positions taken by national political parties on the issue of European
integration over the period 1984–96. Based on the theory of party systems developed by Lipset and Rokkan, we develop a cleavage account of party response to new political issues. We hypothesize that European integration is assimilated into pre-existing ideologies of party leaders, activists and constituencies that reflect long-standing commitments on fundamental domestic issues.

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1999. On the Relationship of Political Opportunities to the Form of Collective Action: The Case of the European Union, with Doug McAdam, in Donatella della Porta, Hanspieter Kriesi and Dieter Rucht, eds. Social Movements in a Globalizing World (New York: St. Martin’s Press), pp. 97-111.

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1999. Territorial Identities in the European Union, in Jeffrey J. Anderson, ed., Regional Integration and Democracy: Expanding on the European Experience (Boulder, CO.: Rowman & Littlefield), pp. 69-91.

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1999. Convergence and Divergence in Advanced Capitalist Societies, in Herbert Kitschelt, Peter Lange, Gary Marks and John Stephens eds., Continuity and Change in Contemporary Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) pp. 427-460.  Also co-authored introduction, pp. 1-8. Reprinted in David Coates, ed., Models of Capitalism: Debating Strengths and Weaknesses (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar).

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1996. Social Movements and the Changing Structure of Political Opportunity in the European Community, with Doug McAdam, West European Politics, 18: 2, pp. 249-278.

"To the extent that European integration results in the decline in the important of the nation-state as the exclusive seat of formal political power, we can expect attendant changes in those forms of interest aggregation and articulation historically linked to the state. This article suggests that a polity characterized by multi-level governance is emerging in Europe and that this poses a set of new constrains and opportunities for groups that wish to influence political decisions. We argue that group strategy in response to this is a function of (1) the structure of political opportunities facing a group in the EU; and (2) inherited institutions and ideologies that constrain the capacity of a group to exploit those opportunities. We use this framework to analyse the effect of European integration on four groups: the labor movement, regional movements, the environmental movement and the anti-nuclear movement."

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1992. Rational Bases of Chaos in Democratic Transition, American Behavioral Scientist 35: 3/4 (March/June), pp. 397-421.    

This paper was a response to a discussion I had at the Center for the Study of Advanced Behavioral Sciences with Philippe Schmitter about the sources of unpredictability in democratic transition. Instead of making simplifying assumptions in an effort to predict outcomes, the paper paper suggests that even simple game-theoretic situations can be unpredicable.

"Why are periods of political stasis, where the existence of the ruling oligarchy appears to be overdetermined, interrupted by episodes of political turmoil, indeterminacy, and apparent chaos? . . .The commonsensical response is that the indeterminacy of such episodes reflects their complexity, the diversity and large number of relevant political actors, their multiple interactions, their incomplete information, and rapidly shifting goals. But in this matter I do not think common sense is a sure guide. Although indeterminate outcomes are often the result of complex systems, they may also be the result of very simple systems. Strategic interaction, even under radically simplified circumstances, may produce outcomes that are
tumultuous and unpredictable. . . .In this essay, I analyze one such example of strategic interaction that lies at the heart of political change in authoritarian political systems.
The model set forth here attempts to capture essential features of strategic interaction within and between a ruling elite and political opposition in the setting of an authoritarian regime."

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1992. Seymour Martin Lipset and the Study of Democracy, with Larry Diamond, American Behavioral Scientist, 35: 3/4 (March/June), pp. 352-362.

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