Explore the vast range of titles available.

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on power dynamics, focusing on the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Utilising a principal-agent framework, it investigates who within the parties determines EU policies and selects EU specialists. Drawing on original interviews with EU experts from Labour, the PS, the SPD and the Party of European Socialists (PES), as well as an e-mail questionnaire, this book reveals that European policy has remained in the hands of the party leadership. The study also suggests that the party grassroots are interested in the EU, but that interest rarely translates into influence. As regards the selection of EU specialists, this book highlights that the parties' processes are highly political, often informal, and in some cases, undemocratic.

The Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are often portrayed as Britain’s pro-European parties. Indeed, both parties express a keen interest in keeping Britain in the European Union (EU) and in promoting a constructive engagement with other member states. Yet, to what extent can the two parties be characterized as Europhiles? In this article, we develop Taggart and Szczerbiak’s (2008) concept of hard and soft Euroscepticism, extend it to Europhile party positions, and apply it to Labour and the Liberal Democrats’ recent European policies. For this purpose, we analyse manifestos and party leaders’ key speeches on the EU. We find, overall, that the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats are ‘soft’ Europhiles whose discourses have focused on EU reform. Yet, while their EU policies are very similar, their EU strategies differ: the Labour leadership have generally tried to contain the salience of EU issues, whereas the Liberal Democrats have followed a more offensive EU strategy after 2014. This can best be explained through electoral incentives and internal dynamics.

In the past, European election campaigns have been fought primarily at national level, organized and led by national parties. The European political parties had neither the financial nor the organizational means to lead pan-European election campaigns. The June 2009 elections, however, highlighted a different and potentially significant trend: new EU regulations provided for the direct financing of European political parties, allowing them to campaign directly in the elections. It is argued that these developments could lead to the Europeanization of European elections campaigns. This article applies the concept of Europeanization to the election campaigns of the Party of European Socialists and three of its member parties: the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party and the German Social Democrats, creating an ideal-type model of Europeanization. It concludes that in the three cases Europeanization is still in its infancy.

This article outlines how Germany has sought to project a strategic narrative of the Eurozone crisis. Germany has been placed center stage in the Eurozone crisis, and as a consequence, the German government's crisis narrative matters for the future of the common currency. We highlight how the German government has sought to narrate a story of the cause of the Eurozone crisis and present policy solutions to influence policy decisions within the EU and maintain domestic political support. This focus on the public communication of the crisis is central to understanding the development of Germany's policy as it was negotiated with EU partners, the U.S. and international financial institutions. We draw on speeches and interviews by Chancellor Angela Merkel and two of her senior cabinet ministers delivered at key moments of the Eurozone crisis between May 2010 and June 2012. The article argues that while Merkel and her governments have been able to shore up domestic support for her Eurozone policies, she has struggled to find a coherent strategic narrative that is both consistent with German domestic preferences and historical memory, and with those of other Eurozone members.

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intraparty democracy? This book is about improving our understanding of political parties as democratic organisations in the context of multi-level governance. More specifically, it analyses the impact of European Union (EU) membership on intra-party power dynamics. The book takes as its focus the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party (Parti Socialiste, PS), and the German Social Democratic Party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, SPD). These are three major centre-left parties of government, operating in the three biggest member states of the EU. Studying centre-left, or social democratic, parties is particularly

This chapter analyses the power dynamics inside the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) in public office. In particular, it investigates the extent to which Members of Parliament (MPs) have been involved in the formulation and scrutiny of European policy and the selection of EU specialists. In our principal—agent model, the party membership is the principal that is expected to delegate a large amount of decision-making power to MPs. As Katz and Mair (1993) remind us, MPs have a number of important resources at their disposal that they can use to their advantage

Does European integration contribute to, or even accelerate, the erosion of intra-party democracy? This book has provided an insight into the dynamic power relationships inside the British Labour Party, the French Socialist Party, and the German Social Democratic Party. It has demonstrated that European integration — as an external constraint — cannot be held solely responsible for the erosion of intra-party democracy. Rather, the three centre-left parties have (to varying degrees) missed the opportunity to adapt their organisations to this multi-level reality. Despite recent attempts by the leaderships of the three parties to empower the grassroots, for example through the use of

This chapter provides some essential contextual information on the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland (SPD), and the Party of European Socialists’ (PES) organisations. It highlights the main differences and commonalities between the parties. Labour, the PS, and the SPD are all ‘multi-level organisations’ (Deschouwer, 2006), which means that they organise at the subnational (local, regional), national, and the European level inside the PES. They also organise at the global level through their involvement with the Socialist International (SI). The PS and SPD are full members of the SI, the worldwide umbrella organisation for socialist, social

This chapter provides background information on the Labour Party, the Parti Socialiste (PS), and the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschland’s (SPD) European policies and recent EU strategies. Recent scholarship has shown more interest in why Eurosceptic parties oppose the European Union (EU), while mainstream parties’ EU positions have received less scholarly attention. Perhaps this is not surprising, given that social democrats, alongside liberals and conservatives, tend to support European integration (Kopecký and Mudde, 2002; Bakker et al., 2015). When we scratch the surface, however, we notice that the centre-left’s attitude towards the EU has often been ambiguous. On the one hand, as