Main

Steven Van Hecke

Abstract

Compared to national political parties, transnational party federations (often known as Europarties) play little role in the European Union (EU). They have no government-making power, and national party politics continue to dominate European Parliament elections. The literature therefore focuses primarily on national political parties operating within the EU framework and on supranational party groups in the European Parliament. In contrast, this review article examines what transnational party federations are and what they do within the context of EU governance, in addition to and reconsidering them in light of recent developments in the EU. By analysing party politics at the transnational level, this article bridges the gap in the literature between research that focuses on the national level and research that focuses on the supranational level. The key conclusion is that transnational party federations do matter, but in a manner different from that of national political parties and supranational party groups. Because transnational party federations offer partisan linkages between different EU institutions, they influence politics and policy-making, in addition to contributing to the increasing politicisation of the EU polity.

Details

Article Keywords

European Union, Transnational party federations, Party politics, EU institutions, Elections

Section
Commentary
Article Copyright
Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Material published in the JCER is done so under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence, with copyright remaining with the author.
  • Articles published online in the JCER cannot be published in another journal without explicit approval of the JCER editor.
  • Authors can 'self-archive' their articles in digital form on their personal homepages, funder repositories or their institutions' archives provided that they link back to the original source on the JCER website. Authors can archive pre-print, post-print or the publisher's version of their work.
  • Authors agree that submitted articles to the JCER will be submitted to various abstracting, indexing and archiving services as selected by the JCER.
Further information about archiving and copyright are contained within the JCER Open Access Policy.