The role of national parties for the politicization of EU integration

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The overall aim of the project is to investigate whether and if yes under which conditions and how national parties contribute to the politicization of EU integration. Politicization hereby means that a topic turns into an issue as it is put on the public agenda and positions are voiced. To understand the process of politicization we study the interplay between national parties as issue entrepreneurs, issue environments, i.e. the overall party as well as the media agenda, and parties as issue traditionalists. We assume that Euroskeptic parties are most likely to act as issue entrepreneurs which strategically mobilize on new policy issues that have been largely ignored by the political mainstream and adopt a policy position on the issue that is substantially different from the current position of the mainstream, vgl. Hobolt and de Vries, 2011, S. 3. Beyond, we expect that the strategic behavior of issue entrepreneurs under certain circumstances will affect the issue environments, i.e. the overall party agenda as well as the mass media agenda. These changes in issue environments may force issue traditionalists, the pro-European mainstream parties, to react. They may either try to silence the issue or they may start voicing their own positions or adopt the new positions brought up by issue entrepreneurs. Empirically, we study the dynamic nature of politicization-processes by conducting a quantitative content analysis of parties strategic communication - press releases and televised campaign spots - and media reporting in a twelve-month period preceding the 2014 European elections. The project thereby applies a comparative research design including Austria, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Sweden, United Kingdom in order to permit the analysis of the relevance of the party system and of other country-context factors for politicization processes. With our study on politicization processes, we contribute to our understanding of the future of European integration: On the one hand public debates about European issues are often regarded as a prerequisite for a European democracy whereas on the other hand such a politicization might challenge long-established mechanisms of policy-making within the European Union. Beyond, our findings shed light on the process of politicization and evolution of issues as such. Here we tackle the core research deficits in this area by linking theories of parties strategic behavior with agenda-setting and by taking into account the dynamic and conditional nature of such politicization processes.