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West European Politics

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Party Change and

Europeanisation: Elements of an
Integrated Approach
Robert Ladrech
Published online: 16 Apr 2012.

To cite this article: Robert Ladrech (2012) Party Change and Europeanisation:
Elements of an Integrated Approach, West European Politics, 35:3, 574-588, DOI:
10.1080/01402382.2012.665741

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 West European Politics,
Vol. 35, No. 3, 574–588, May 2012

SYMPOSIUM

Party Change and Europeanisation:

Elements of an Integrated Approach
ROBERT LADRECH
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The literature on party organisational change emphasises environmental factors as well

as internal circumstances. The literature on Europeanisation and political parties
privileges the EU as a key environmental factor in terms of change. This article
combines insights from the party organisation and Europeanisation literatures in order
to more precisely conceptualise the EU as a stimulus and therefore causal factor in
party organisational change. Two types of party change are analysed, new party
positions (MEPs and specialised EU party staff) and party leaderships’ responses to
internal dissent over the EU. Linking a specific form of EU stimulus to a particular
party goal helps to explain certain types of change, while inter-governmental bargaining
may produce uncertainty for domestic political actors thereby inducing defensive
reactions.

The growing literature on Europeanisation and political parties has focused

primarily on describing examples of party change influenced by the
European Union. In other words, most effort has gone into describing the
effect rather than the cause of EU-related change in political parties. This
has included changes in party manifesto content, organisation, relations
with the party’s MEPs, the post-communist experience and so on. On the
one hand, it would seem obvious that the EU is implicated in the changes
that have been documented: MEPs would not exist without a European
Parliament to populate, the position of a European party secretary would
not have been created unless liaison with transnational parties – defined in
the EU’s treaties – were not deemed necessary, and references to the EU or
EU policies in national party manifestos would not appear without a
reference point, to name just a few obvious EU-related changes. On the
other hand, without a theory or approach as to how the EU can be more
exactly framed as a cause, explaining variation across parties is limited and
ad hoc. Indeed, to state that certain change in parties occurs simply because
the EU is influential in domestic political systems risks misattributing change
to the EU as well as being unable to explain resistance to change or

Correspondence Address: r.ladrech@keele.ac.uk

ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª 2012 Taylor & Francis

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2012.665741
 Party Change and Europeanisation 575

variability. The articles in this symposium represent a further contribution

to this body of analysis. In particular, all four articles analyse an aspect of
party organisation in which the EU can be linked to a change in internal
behaviour, rules, or relations between different components of the party.
Apart from the present article, which directly engages with the issue of
causality, in the other articles the EU is portrayed variously as an
authoritative agency, an issue generating public opinion reaction thereby
complicating party strategy, or a separate but linked level of governance.
The fact the EU is contextualised in very different formats depending on
the type of observed change demonstrates a need to bring some conceptual
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order to the issue of causality in EU-related party change. However, the

question of exactly how the EU may influence party organisational change
has not, for the most part, been directly confronted. One reason why little
attention has been directed to the issue of causality is the fact that political
party research and Europeanisation studies have not overlapped to any
great degree. Ladrech (2002) gave only passing attention to the issue of
causality in party Europeanisation, instead setting out and justifying five
areas for investigation, namely organisation, programme, party–govern-
ment relations, patterns of party competition and relations beyond the
national political system. If that article has been taken as a template for
subsequent research, it is then not surprising that more effort has been
expended in the search for evidence of change rather than adequately
explaining how the EU is responsible. Instead, the EU – which is evidently a
cause of domestic institutional and policy Europeanisation (Graziano and
Vink 2007) – has been assumed to wield a corresponding significance in
those areas of the domestic political system that have consequences for
parties. Left undeveloped was the precise nature of an EU action that would
motivate party leaderships to respond with appropriate adjustments. The
systemic changes that were articulated, namely ‘increased government policy
constraint’ and ‘the public perception of growing irrelevance of conven-
tional politics’ (Ladrech 2002: 395) were not linked to a specific type of party
change.
A more recent exception to this state of affairs is the brief consideration of
this issue by Carter et al. (2007) as part of a research project on party
organisation and Europeanisation. They stress the growing influence of the
EU as an environment in which parties operate: ‘it is therefore reasonable to
expect parties to have engaged in formal or informal organisational
adaptation given that European integration has greatly increased the
complexity of the environment within which parties operate’ (Carter et al.
2007: 9). They also note that party responses may vary, and set out several
intervening variables, country- and party-specific. Crucially, they mention
that the ‘supranational level impacts directly upon in particular two of the
three key goals that the party literature (e.g. Müller and Strøm 1999)
ascribes to political parties, namely votes and policy’ (Carter et al. 2007: 8).
The present article seeks to build upon these important considerations by
 576 R. Ladrech

combining insights from the Europeanisation literature on the issue of

causality with the party organisation literature in order to explain how the
EU can be conceptualised as a stimulus for different types of organisational
change. This article focuses in particular upon two different types of party
organisation change, the first in the form of new positions and accompany-
ing statutory amendments and the second as a party leadership response to
pressure to manage the ‘EU as an issue’ within the party. In the case of the
second type of change, the intervening variable consists of type of party
organisation. By combining features of the party change literature with that
of the Europeanisation approach in a more explicit fashion, progress may be
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made in analysing and explaining the variability of EU-influenced

organisational change in national parties, thereby responding to Mair’s
(2007: 162) suggestion that ‘the impact of Europeanization on parties and
party systems, whether direct or indirect, needs to be integrated more closely
into the more general theories of party change and development’.

Defining Party Organisational Change and Environmental Stimulus

Recognising change in political party organisation, the dependent variable,
should not be a particularly difficult task. Yet as Harmel (2002: 136) notes,
‘there have been few attempts to explicitly define what ‘‘organizational
change’’ actually means or includes’. He attributes this state of affairs to the
fact that ‘different studies have measured the concept of organizational
change with very different indicators, which may, in fact, tap quite disparate
dimensions of party organization’ (Harmel 2002: 136). The task presented
here is not to provide a universal definition of ‘organisational change’ in
parties; rather, in the context of EU-related change, there is a need to be
precise in terms of focus and therefore the dependent variable as well as with
the independent variable, the EU. It is not suggested that the EU is a factor
in the development of a new type of party organisational style, as for
example the catch-all or the cartel party.
The intent of the present article is to explain how newly created party
positions and the techniques employed by party leaderships for managing
internal pressure can be explained in a systematic fashion that links the EU
to the particular type of organisational change. The ‘integrated theory of
party goals and party change’ by Harmel and Janda (1994) provides
important insights into conceptualising EU-influenced party change.
Harmel and Janda argue that organisational change may occur due to
one or a combination of three factors; first, a change in leadership, second, a
change in the dominant faction and, third, an external stimulus for change.
It is clear that the EU represents an external environment (as well as an
actor), and the discussion below considers its multi-faceted nature, but the
main point at this stage of the argument is to consider the linkage of an
external stimulus to organisational change. Harmel and Janda’s key insight
in this regard, as recognised by Carter et al. (2007), is that party change is
 Party Change and Europeanisation 577

linked with party goals and, further, that an external stimulus impacts on
the party’s primary goal. They expand the three party goals offered by
Müller and Strøm (1999) by adding to policy, office and votes, the
representation or participation of party members. They also make clear that
an individual party will prioritise one of these goals as the ‘primary’ goal. It
is the impact upon this primary goal that the external stimulus may trigger
an adaptational change. Harmel and Janda (1994: 262) claim that their
theory ‘provides for differing impacts of different external stimuli, based on
the fit of the stimulus to a party’s primary goal’.
As Harmel and Janda (1994) employ the term, a stimulus that generates
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an organisational response is usually of a sudden nature, or a ‘shock’.

However, they recognise that incremental changes in an environment can
also produce party organisational change, and in this regard they speak of
a ‘trend’ rather than a ‘shock’ (Harmel 2002; Harmel and Janda 1994). A
‘trend’ is defined as ‘a series of incremental changes in aggregate
observations that tend to move in the same direction so that they cumulate
into a consistent, measurable shift over time’ (Harmel and Janda 1994:
277). If we apply these concepts to the EU as the external stimulus, two
concerns are immediately apparent. The first is to more explicitly conceive
of the EU as a ‘trend’. One of the contributions of the Europeanisation
literature is the recognition that the external actor, i.e. the EU, cannot
always be considered a unitary actor exerting influence downwards upon
its member states, that is, the top-down representation of causal flows
(Ladrech 2010). Instead, it is recognised that the multi-level architecture of
the EU implicates domestic actors, national government in many cases, as
the instigator of an EU decision that is then transmitted to member states
in the form of authoritative EU legislation. Consequently, for purposes of
this discussion, one must be extremely careful in apportioning responsi-
bility to an external stimulus – the EU – if the identified causal factor
actually has its origins in domestic affairs. Mattila and Raunio (2012), to
give but one example, conclude that party leaderships strive to suppress
open debate over the EU as an issue due to the widening gap between
official party policy and the opinion of voters, which is slowly becoming
more Eurosceptic. In this case, the party goal of vote maximisation is
threatened by the EU issue, but is it the EU that is the stimulus for party
leadership techniques for deflecting internal party debate or changing
public opinion, i.e. a growing Euroscepticism? Thus conceptualising the
EU as a trend in terms of an incremental growth in a series of changes is a
more complex undertaking.
The second task is to link the particular stimulus to an identified
organisational change; in this respect, the article by Mühlböck (2012) is
clear in establishing a relationship between an external environment – the
EP party groups – and changes in national party control or supervision of its
MEPs. She demonstrates the measures taken by the national party (the
principal) to control its elected members (the agents) by devising certain
 578 R. Ladrech

rules. Again, at first glance, the stimulus for changing party rules regarding
the activity of its politicians would be the demands placed upon MEPs by
the desire of the EP groups to increase voting discipline. Where this conflicts
with national party positions, the MEP must decide which to support. This
situation is only a matter of concern for national parties – presumably their
goal of policy seeking – if MEP behaviour runs counter to party positions.
Again, certainly the environment that MEPs operate, the EP, is an external
environment from the perspective of the national party, but MEPs, as
Mühlböck (2012) makes clear, are supposed to be agents of the national
party. In this case, it may be that a two-stage process is at work, that is,
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pressure on the national party agents by EP group decision-making causing

changed behaviour which then triggers a response by the national party (the
principal); this assumes that group decisions, even if contrary to national
party preferences, actually matter enough for national party leaderships to
devise new rules to monitor its agents (MEPs). The linkage between an
external stimulus and party change is then not as straightforward as one
might first expect when considering the role of the EU.
In some cases, however, the role of the external stimulus is much more
direct, as the case of party funding and attendant norms is made clear by
van Biezen and Molenaar (2012). Although they expand the number of
external actors in their case to include the Council of Europe and the
European Court of Human Rights as well as the EU, there is a much clearer
causal link between the influence of these external agencies and the parties
reported. It is the case, however, that most of the parties covered by van
Beizen and Molenaar (2012) are in political systems experiencing
democratisation, and the party change literature may have an insight as
to why there is a more receptive party response. Panebianco (1988) speaks of
the level of party institutionalisation, in which the greater the institutiona-
lisation, the less the party tends to passively adapt itself to the environment.
With regard to post-communist parties, institutionalisation will have been
low and the need for external legitimation high, thereby explaining
the relative success of external agencies in influencing domestic party
legislation (Lewis and Markowski 2011). The article now turns directly to a
discussion of two identified types of change and the position of the EU as a
stimulus.

The EU as Environmental Stimulus

Carter et al. (2007) suggest that the EU exerts influence on national parties
in several ways, similar to Harmel and Janda’s (1994) integrated theory.
First, as the European Parliament has direct and competitive elections,
national parties’ goal of winning votes is linked to this arena. The increased
policy competence in Brussels also ‘might further stimulate parties to adapt
their internal processes of manifesto formulation and intra-party decision-
making on policy priorities’ (Carter et al. 2007: 8). Therefore, European
 Party Change and Europeanisation 579

Parliament elections activate a party’s goal to win elections, and thus field
candidates. The transfer of policy competence to the EU, forming a
complementary policy authority to the national government, stimulates a
party policy response detectable in manifestos and programme. They
recognise that adaptation is not automatic, and therefore emphasise the
crucial explanatory role of intervening variables to compensate for
variation. Nevertheless, although their contribution is an important step
to linking the party change literature with the Europeanisation approach by
bringing party goals and environmental factors into the picture, the EU is
again left rather nebulous as an environment, actor and, consequently, a
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stimulus. Mair (2007: 156–7), in his attempt to bring some conceptual clarity
to the emerging party Europeanisation literature, speaks of a direct and
indirect EU impact upon national parties, wherein direct effects are
associated with adaptation to explicit electoral innovations by the EU, for
example the introduction of direct elections to the EP which means that
national parties may choose to recruit personnel, expend resources and
devise statutes governing the participation of MEPs in national party
decision-making; and indirect effects in which the EU’s policy influence has
ramifications for the domestic political system in general and which then has
potential repercussions for parties, as in the salience of the EU as an issue in
party competition.

Party Change 1: New Party Positions

In both Mair (2007) and Carter et al. (2007), organisational innovation in
terms of new party positions such as MEPs and national staff is linked to the
goal of vote maximisation as evidenced by participation in EP elections. One
might also add that participation in EP elections can also be seen as a way of
influencing EU policy-making, in terms of influencing the EP–Commission–
Council legislative process (see Hooghe and Marks 1999 concerning the
class cleavage transferred to the European level). However, upon closer
inspection, the linkage between the primary goal (whether vote maximisa-
tion or policy-shaping) and the existence of EP elections (the environmental
stimulus) is not so clear. In the case of direct elections to the EP, which
commenced in 1979 (but were agreed in 1976), uncertainty as to the influence
of the EP in the future as an authoritative EU institution as well as the
relevance of a European-level party system (should it develop) characterised
the establishment of transnational parties and participation in EP elections.
In an atmosphere of such uncertainty, participation in EP elections was a
conservative strategy, that is, more of an insurance policy should the EP
ever develop into a formidable co-legislature with the Council. The fact that
mainstream party MEPs have, by and large, been kept at the margins of
internal party life attests to the nature of this organisational change (Raunio
2002; Raunio and Hix 2000). It has also been fairly obvious for the
subsequent 30 years of EP elections that the role of the EP, though certainly
 580 R. Ladrech

increased in stature within the EU inter-institutional relationship, has not

increased its profile within domestic political systems. Therefore, EP
elections can hardly be said to elicit an adaptational change because it
impacts neither vote maximisation or policy shaping as primary goals of
national parties. In fact, if vote maximisation were a goal for national party
involvement in EP elections, there would have been much more effort
expended at campaigns to increase vote share, and if anything, the literature
on EP elections continues to characterise them as second-order, especially in
the case of western European parties (Reif and Schmitt 1980; Schmitt 2005).
Further, the results of EP elections are ring-fenced, so that even historically
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negative results have not caused a change in leadership, unlike in the case of
national elections. As for the creation of specialised positions within
national party organisations, such as a Europe secretary (a specialised
position in addition to an International secretary), liaison between national
EP delegations and respective national parties, etc., the timing of most of
these coincides with the intensification of the European integration process
beginning with the Single Europe Act of 1987 through to the Maastricht
Treaty of 1992. This intensification of the European integration process
explains why the transnational party federations, first established in the mid-
1970s in anticipation of the 1979 direct elections, began their next phase of
organisational development, a process crucially influenced by national party
leaders (Johansson and Zervakis 2002). Again, maintaining linkages with
transnational party federations through the use of specialised staff and
maintaining national party control is a defensive act should a European-
level party system develop as a result of further European integration
decisions negotiated by inter-governmental bargaining.
This returns us to the question of the nature of the EU as a stimulus for
the type of organisational change described. In both cases, direct elections to
the EP beginning at the end of the 1980s and renewed attention to the role of
transnational parties beginning at the end of the 1980s, national parties
participated in these arenas at the outset. Harmel and Janda (1994: 267)
point out that party leaders or some key party actor must recognise the
potential implications of an environmental shock or trend for the party’s
primary goal:

Given that parties are basically conservative organizations, a stimulus

would presumably have to catch the attention of someone in the party
who would see fit to argue that adaptive change would be needed in
order for the party to ‘do better’ in some way than it would otherwise
do.

If we have discounted the assumption that EP elections and the creation of

transnational parties can be linked to the activation of national parties’
primary goal of vote maximisation, or even policy-shaping, due to the weak
position of these institutions during the initial period of national party
 Party Change and Europeanisation 581

participation, then another cause must account for the changes as well as the
timing; it must also be of a nature to explain how awareness of the stimulus
was transmitted across all major parties in all member states. There are
some clues, found in the scope of party inclusion and the timing. First, all
major parties of government, from the centre-left to the centre-right, chose
to participate in EP elections beginning in 1979. The decisions represent
more a state or government action than, in the strict sense, a party reaction
to the attraction of participating in an additional arena of competitive
politics. The approval for direct elections came from member state
governments, which of course are party governments, but the key fact is
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that direct elections were a result of inter-governmental negotiation (Dinan

1999). As for EU-related national party staff, mostly in place by the mid-
1990s, and coinciding with the organisational development of transnational
parties beginning in the late 1980s, the assumption that they are instruments
of expertise is undermined by the background of incumbents over the years
in most parties, i.e. expert knowledge of European matters was not a
prerequisite for the position. It is more accurate to see these positions as a
means of lowering the transaction costs to party leaderships of having to
maintain relations with an entirely new level of partisan actors. In other
words, apart from a party spokesperson on ‘Europe’, most other Europe-
related party staff are charged with liaising with other levels of European
party actors, and not as decision-makers (Poguntke et al. 2007). The fact
that all major parties in each member state at the time became involved in
elections attests to a negotiated change involving government and party
representatives.
Second, the timing of these changes was dependent on negotiations about
European integration, not primarily ‘democratisation’ through direct
elections. Agreement over direct elections was ‘intended both to satisfy an
obligation in the Treaty of Rome and to defuse criticism that the European
Council would strengthen intergovernmentalism at the expense of suprana-
tionalism in the EC’ (Dinan 1999: 75). Direct EP elections were a by-product
of intergovernmental bargaining; the EU (or the EC at this time) is not itself
the stimulus, but decisional outputs by national politicians, some supporting
an elected EP (e.g. Germany and the Netherlands), some opposing (e.g. the
UK and France). In both cases, the party literature on organisational
change can help to explain the party response to these EU-level outcomes.
Panebianco (1988: 205) has drawn attention to the fact that ‘the more
complex the environment the less predictable it is’. In particular,
unpredictability ‘pushes the organisation towards internal specialization,
i.e. to the multiplication of specialised roles in dealing with different aspects
of the environment, in the hope of dominating it’ (Panebianco 1988: 205).
Participating initially in elections to the EP and creating specialised roles
inside the party organisation are responses to the complexity created by
European integration decisions, which, negotiated by government leaders
who were themselves party leaders, were communicated inside the party
 582 R. Ladrech

organisation. The stimulus triggering this adaptation is then the condition of

complexity and uncertainty which was a result of the development of the
European level of politics. Only in this sense, thus indirectly, could party
goals be brought into the analysis as being affected by the process of
European integration. The ‘firewall’ between most MEPs and their national
party, as well as the organisational isolation of EU specialists inside parties,
suggests that the response was limited in order to preserve internal
organisational stability (Panebianco 1988).
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Party Change 2: Leadership Responses to Internal Pressure

If uncertainty surrounding the development of EU multi-level electoral
politics produced increased complexity for national parties, triggering a
defensive reaction, the second type of change, namely party leadership
response to internal pressure over the EU or EU policy, operates from
different premises. According to Mattila and Raunio (2012), one of the
consequences that derive from the increasingly low level of opinion
congruence between major parties and their voters over the issue of the
EU is the strategy of avoiding debates on Europe. They conclude that this
‘pressure on party leaders, and their success or failure in managing the EU
issue in their respective parties, is another manifestation of the Europea-
nization of party politics’. It is certainly the case that the primary goal that
party leaders seek to protect is maximising votes – for opening the party to
public debate over its position on the EU may alienate those supporters of
its official stance if deep divisions are revealed. This can send mixed signals
to voters and supporters thus undermining support (Gabel and Scheve
2007). The party leaderships of mainstream centre-left and centre-right
parties, with notable exceptions (e.g. the British Labour and Conservative
parties at different periods since 1973), have more or less been supportive of
the advances regarding the European integration project. What Mattila and
Raunio report is one factor – public opinion – that leads party leaderships to
maintain a generally quiescent position regarding the politics of the EU.
However, in some parties, in order to maintain the status quo, party
leaderships must contend with internal pressure or dissent intended to push
for different positions regarding an EU policy, and it is the strategies devised
by leaderships that characterise another type of change in party organisa-
tional dynamics.
One can add party cohesiveness to the goals a party seeks to accomplish,
especially if an issue threatens to destabilise a party such that the goals of
vote maximisation, office seeking and policy seeking are themselves
undermined. As Mattila and Raunio (2012) demonstrate, the EU can be
such an issue; however only certain parties appear to experience tensions of
an extraordinary nature. In order to explain why some parties are more
susceptible to internal division over the EU, and consequently what tactics
are devised by party leaderships in order to avoid de-stabilisation, the party
 Party Change and Europeanisation 583

change literature, including salience theory, can provide insights that in turn
produce appropriate intervening variables.
Steenbergen and Scott (2004) have argued that salience theory can assist
in explaining how the EU as an issue is variously manipulated by party
leaderships, and they contend that party cohesiveness is a primary goal for
which strategic manipulation is required when internal division is
threatened. According to their study,

parties appear to be responsive to party cohesion needs: modest levels

of internal dissent significantly reduce the salience of European
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integration. However, the effect of dissent is non-linear, and at higher

levels of dissent the salience of European integration actually
increases. (Steenbergen and Scott 2004: 188)

A couple of issues are immediately raised regarding the relationship between

the EU as a stimulus and internal party dissent. First, is it the EU by way of
a particular action, e.g. a policy proposal, which is the cause of division? Is it
simply membership, and the dissension, as in the case of the British
Conservative Party, is latent until a particular related issue inflames internal
attitudes? Second, only some parties experience tension over EU matters
(broadly defined), so what intervening variables can help in determining the
variability? Lastly, success may be measured by the ability of party
leadership to deflect the internal division into channels that do not de-
stabilise the party, which could manifest itself in public strife, change of
leadership and/or electoral weakness.
If we confine the discussion to mainstream western European parties of
the centre-left and centre-right, there are very few parties that actually
experience internal division over the EU in any significant manner. The
British Conservative Party is the obvious candidate for this distinction,
although its evolution into a Eurosceptic party since the early 1990s removes
it from consideration here (Crowson 2007). On the other hand, despite the
fact that all other parties in the three party families of social democrats,
liberals and Christian democrats have historically supported European
integration efforts, this does not mean that from time to time a particular
party has not experienced internal dissension such that the party leadership
has had to resort to defusing the threat to internal stability with a
concession. In this regard then, when the EU is connected in some manner
to an eruption within a party that is not usually categorised as ‘Eurosceptic’,
an opportunity presents itself to refine the analytical lens as to the question
of stimulus. Examples of parties that have experienced noticeable division
since the re-launch of European integration in the late 1980s have mostly
been left-of-centre parties, including the Swedish Social Democrats, Belgian
Socialist Party (francophone) and the French Socialist Party. The common
denominator in terms of EU stimulus has been the economic policy
orientation of the EU, crystallised at particular junctures; for the Swedish
 584 R. Ladrech

Social Democrats, the referendum on joining monetary union, for the

Belgian and French Socialists, ratification of the Constitutional Treaty.
In both cases, the perceived neo-liberal orientation of the EU mobilised the
left-wing faction in these parties. The response by the Swedish and French
leaderships was to compartmentalise the issue into an internal party
referendum (Aylott 2002; Ivaldi 2006); in the Belgian case, the leadership
held special forums for activists to articulate their opposition (and thereby
defuse the situation). The EU policy development serves as the critical EU
stimulus, and the timing is explained by the two events. This establishes the
link between stimulus and the party goal of party cohesiveness. The question
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to answer is why have these three parties in particular experienced such

division?
On the one hand, none of these three parties can be considered ‘niche’
parties (Adams et al. 2006; Meguid 2005, 2008); on the other hand, nor are
they mainstream parties whose leaderships are able to easily shift policy to
changes in the mean party voter (Adams et al. 2009). They are mainstream
parties for which a key characteristic is that the party organisation allows a
substantial amount of influence to party militants. Factional struggle can be
viewed as another important variable (as a constraint) in leaderships’
internal strategy to shift policy (Harmel and Tan 2003). Both membership in
the euro (Swedish Social Democrats) and ‘constitutionalising’ the economic
orientation of the EU, in particular price stability (Belgian and French
Socialists), were fundamental events which the left wing in each party
perceived as antithetical to party policy and party ideology in general.
Related to these events and in the same category of EU as a policy stimulus
was the reaction by left wings in many social democratic parties to the EU’s
2006 services directive, another step considered too far in liberalising
economies (Miklin 2009). By combining EU policy as a stimulus at a
particular point in time with the type of party organisation, namely one in
which the party organisation ‘face’ is influential in comparison with the
party in public office (Katz and Mair 1993) or, as Müller and Strøm (1999)
propose, a policy-seeking party, the more electoral-oriented or office-
oriented party leaderships of these parties were not automatically in a
position of strength to adjust party policy. This accords with the assertion
by Scott and Steenbergen (2004: 169) that in parties experiencing major
dissent the party leadership will be unable to strategically manipulate the
issue (i.e. de-emphasise it), especially when ‘a significant faction disagrees
with the mainstream of the party on an issue. It is likely that such
disagreement will inspire extensive debate within the party and, as a
consequence, the divisive issue will receive a great deal of emphasis’. The
argument is that party activists take policy considerations as key to political
action. In each of these cases, party leaderships offered ‘enhanced’ forms of
intra-party democracy to defuse the issue, departing from usual internal
party organisational practices. It is the case that most social democratic
parties are not characterised by such organisational structures (Heidar and
 Party Change and Europeanisation 585

Koole 2000; Katz and Mair 2002), and this explains the exceptional nature
of the internal challenge to the Swedish, Belgian and French leaderships, all
of which were advocating acceptance or a ‘yes’ vote in their respective
national campaigns. At the same time, the reaction of left wings in other
social democratic parties, though muted in comparison to the three parties
considered in this analysis, is nevertheless perceptible (Edwards 2007;
Hooghe and Marks 2009; Marks and Steenbergen 2004); strong party
leaderships do however manipulate internal matters to de-emphasise EU
issues with actions ranging from muffling to displacement (Parsons and
Weber 2011). In this case, then, linking the EU as a stimulus requires
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specifying the nature of the stimulus, here a policy initiative – monetary

union for the Swedish, a Constitutional Treaty for the Belgian and French –
which at a specific moment mobilised a strong left-wing faction, thus
affecting the goal of policy cohesiveness in these three parties, parties which
were more susceptible to de-stabilising internal division because of the
nature of their respective party organisation type.
If the party organisation and change literature has contributed to
clarifying matters for this second type of party change, the Europeanisation
literature can offer additional helpful insights. The causal process high-
lighted in Europeanisation research focuses on a mechanism of change
labelled ‘misfit’, applied to both domestic institutional and policy change
(Risse et al. 2001). Unintended changes may result indirectly from the
‘misfit’ between EU policy content and initiatives and institutional
operation (including between EU institutions and national actors) and that
of a particular member state government (Börzel 2005). The greater the
degree of misfit between the two levels, the greater the chance that domestic
policy or institutional change will occur; the argument also provides for
intervening variables such as veto players that can explain the variability of
such change. Applying the concept of misfit to explain party change,
initiatives brought about at the European level, whether the inter-
governmental bargain to create a directly elected European parliament or
further advances in legally binding economic liberalisation, have introduced
factors that opened a gap between domestic practices and expectations. The
creation of party EU specialists, as the party organisation literature makes
clear, supports the thesis that a more complex environment triggers an
essentially defensive response; the anticipated creation of direct elections
opened a new yet unknown arena of competitive politics which obliged
national parties to fill, ring-fencing these individuals (MEPs as well as party
EU specialists) from the core of national party activity. In the second type of
change, party leadership strategies to manage internal dissent, a more
straightforward reading of the Europeanisation thesis is apparent: policy
differences triggered a political response from those party factions that
believed their policy-seeking goal was threatened, and their action impacted
on party cohesion, thus triggering innovative responses from party
leaderships.
 586 R. Ladrech

Conclusion
By integrating elements of the party change literature with that of the
Europeanisation approach, and more generally the analysis of European
integration, a better understanding of how the EU affects parties can be
demonstrated. The articles in this symposium all focus on a different
aspect of Europeanised party change, but in each one a causal link is made
with a particular EU institutional practice or policy initiative. Although
much work has been accomplished with regard to the EU as an issue of
public opinion and party positioning for European Parliament elections
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(for example see van der Brug and van der Eijk 2007) and party manifesto
change (Pennings 2006), apart from the relationship of MEPs to their
national party, internal organisational change has not had much attention,
and, as this article demonstrates, refining the definition of the EU as a
stimulus has also required attention. In the end, Harmel and Janda’s
(1994: 262) assertion that their integrated theory of party goals and party
change ‘provides for differing impacts of different external stimuli’ can
apply to the study of the impact of the EU as a stimulus for party change,
though its manifestation as a stimulus varies as to the specific effect on
domestic party change. This fact should not be too surprising when we
consider that ‘the EU’ is itself a political system, consisting of institutions,
policies, partisan and inter-governmental conflict and, consequently,
politics. Specifying which dimension of this novel ‘environmental stimulus’
affects a particular domestic party change is the task of party
Europeanisation analysis.

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