National Political Parties and Party Systems in the Study of European Integration

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to overview how the existing literature analyses the impact of domestic party politics on European policy chosen by national governments and thus, indirectly, on the course of European integration. Our hypothesis is that divergence of policy between Britain and France on European monetary cooperation is best explained by whether coordination of European policy between the government and opposition was successful or not. Therefore, the main aim of this survey is to examine how the existing literature estimates the impact of either the relationships between government and opposition, or of the national party system, on the process of European integration. We begin our literature survey with (1) the theories of European integration such as neo-functionalism and intergovernmentalism, then move to (2) multilevel governance, and conclude with (3) British politics, French politics and comparative European politics. We exclude the numerous (and still increasing) works on Europeanisation of domestic policy, polity and politics from our investigation, because the direction of causality in these works is the reverse of ours.1