2 Analysing the EU ‘Party System’

By the EU party system, (see Hix and Lord 1997: 56) is meant here the party groups in the European Parliament, the EU extra-parliamentary parties and party federations, and even national parties in so far as they structure choice in European elections. Whilst, of course, the Council of Ministers, and even the Commission, are drawn indirectly from the governing parties of the Member States, this review is mainly interested in assessing our understanding of those aspects of the Union that are explicitly organised for party politics.

Of the party families common to many EU Member States, Christian Democrats and Conservatives, Socialists and Social Democrats, Liberals, Greens, the Far Left and Eurosceptics have all managed to organise themselves into multi-national groups in successive European Parliaments. Only the Far Right has found it hard to form a group at all. Only the Eurosceptics have found it hard to cope with the left-right pattern of voting in the Parliament. Only the regionalists have had to distribute themselves across groups formed by other party families.

However, whilst European party groups exercise the powers of the Parliament, citizens do not vote directly for them. Rather, they choose between national parties, whose only cross-national linkage for the purposes of European elections consists of their common membership of the so-called ‘European Union parties’ listed in table 1.

Since the Treaty on European Union (1992) ‘Political parties at European level’ have been recognised as an ‘important factor for integration within the Union’. The Nice Treaty (2001) then authorised the Council to lay ‘down regulations governing political parties and in particular rules governing their financing’ at European level (European Communities Treaty, A. 191). In the hope of confining status and resources to authentically transnational party networks whose activities are directed at influencing the institutions of the Union (Jansen 2001: 8), the ‘European Party Statute’ stipulated that ‘political parties at the European level’ must be:

‘…represented in at least one quarter of Member States by Members of the European Parliament, members of national parliaments, or members of regional parliaments or assemblies or have received in at least one quarter of Member States at least three per cent of the vote in those Member States in the most recent European elections’.

If, moreover, they have not already participated in a European election, they must have ‘expressed an intention of doing so’ (Official Journal of the European Union, 15 November 2003, L 297/1-4).

Yet, Thomas Jansen is surely right to ask ‘are these “political parties at the European level” or “European Union parties?”’ (Jansen 2001: 7). Putting the question this way highlights the slipperiness of the Treaty language. It also underscores how even the tests in the Statute could be satisfied by mechanisms for co-ordinating the engagement of national parties with the Union.

Does the academic literature suggest any clearer criteria than the Statute for determining how far the European Union has political parties of its own? One dismissive approach amounts to a simple syllogism: Parties need mass memberships and/or a direct relationship with voters. The EU parties have neither. Therefore, they are ‘pseudo-parties’. End of discussion.

A very different approach begins, as it were, at the other end of the spectrum of party political development. It asks not so much ‘what would be needed for full political parties at the EU level?’ as ‘what would be the minimum deviation from pure co-ordination mechanisms between national parties that would allow us to talk meaningfully of party politics specific to the European Union arena’ (my quotation marks)? Here the search is usually guided by an implicit assumption of isomorphism. In the words Tsatsos report of the European Parliament, it is assumed that the best way to recognise a Euro-party is through ‘various features derived from the image of the political parties in the Member States and transferred - mutatis mutandis - to the level of the European Union’ (Parliament 1996: 4). Whether there is much to be gained from this approach is best appraised through a critical examination of the following claims associated with it:

Claim 1.

The internal structures of ‘Euro-parties’ resemble those of political parties: As Jansen puts it, the typical structure of the Euro-parties is that ‘a congress of delegates decides on the policy programme, an executive body deals with day-to-day business, a party leader acts as a spokesperson, and a party secretariat provides technical and organisational back-up’ (Jansen 2001: 16). Euro-parties also resemble national parties in linking the parliamentary and extra-parliamentary dimensions of their political systems. Some three quarters of MEPs come from national parties which are committed by their membership of Euro-parties to joining a corresponding groups in the EP. Also worth noting is that by allowing individual membership, some of the Euro-parties are not stricto sensu ‘parties of parties’.

Claim 2.

Euro-parties are recognised as such through a mechanism for their resourcing through the political system itself. Until the practice was declared illegal by the ECJ, Euro-parties were funded from the EP budget via the party groups in the Parliament. Now the Party Statute is in place, they are funded from the Community budget.

Claim 3.

Euro-parties perform a similar function to conventional political parties in agreeing programmes and manifestos. Euro-parties have long agreed manifestos for European elections. However, this may even under-state their contribution to the programmatic development of the Union. Some commentators claim, first, that national parties form, and do not merely exchange, preferences on EU matters through the medium of the Europarties; and, second, that those socialised preferences then feed into Treaty change and other policy development (Johansson 1999; Kulahci 2001) through national parties of government, and through use by the EP groups of Euro-party texts to guide their own co-operation (Jansen 2001).

Claim 4.

National parties have to some degree ‘limited their autonomy’ in favour of the Euro-parties. The most obvious evidence for this lies in the Statutes of the EPP (European People’s Party), PES (Party of European Socialists), ELDR (European Liberal and Democratic Reform Party), which have all allowed party positions to be established by majority vote.

Yet, none of the previous claims is conclusive. Structural resemblances between Europarties and conventional political parties may be mimetic only Union resourcing may even be taken as a sign that Europarties lack the roots in society that would allow them to do more to fund themselves. Accounts of how and where political preferences are formed are notoriously over-determined and therefore elusive. Majority voting is balanced by a lack of clear sanctions (in both the groups and the Europarties) for those who do not follow the majority line.

Even the role of Europarties in cross-institutional co-ordination may be grounds for doubting, rather than confirming, their ‘partyness’. The key point here is that national party leaders of at least the EPP, PES and ELDR meet in their Europarties prior to European Councils. On occasions, ‘caucusing’ through Europarties may also impact on the business of sectoral Councils of Ministers. In the view of some, this need to be serviceable to bargaining between governments – and would-be parties of government – tells us who the Europarties’ real political masters are. In contrast, claims that Europarties do anything meaningful to link citizens to representatives are only part of a façade politicisation ‘engineered’ by the Commission and Council themselves to add legitimacy to otherwise technocratic and intergovernmental modes of decision-making (Bartolini 2005: 355-356; Bartolini 2006: 37).

"The aggregating function of political parties in EU decision-making" Christopher J. Lord http://www.livingreviews.org/lreg-2006-2

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