Political Parties and Europe

This article examines the Europeanization of national partisan competition. We return to the debate on the effect of European integration on domestic politics by examining the politicization of European issues through their treatment in electoral platforms. Relying on a new dataset from the Comparative Agenda Project, we show that the classic hypothesis of the absorption of European issues by national divisions must be moderated. Our three cases - Germany, France and the United Kingdom - illustrate quite different ways of politicizing European issues, with a very variable proportion of the ""constitutive issues"" related to the architecture and EU legitimacy in relation to public policies issues. This exploratory research therefore confirms the importance of taking into account the substance of politicized problems related to European integration.