|
Resumen:
|
The organisational, institutional and political development of the European Union (EU) has implied a major change in domestic politics. While the Union objectives were just the longterm development of a common market but with just few policy competences, the EU arena was not so relevant for domestic policies and parties. But since the 1980s with the Single European Act and especially the Maastricht treaty and the development of the political Union, the growing relevance of the EU, conceptualised as a new polity, has an important effect on national political systems. This change is fairly shown by the new specific subfield on the research agenda regarding EU studies, that is, the analysis of the effects of European integration on member states’ actors and institutions. That is what it has been labelled as Europeanisation, the reaction and adaptation of Member states to the process of European integration. Nowadays the EU has many policy competences in very different domains. Therefore, it is interesting to analyse how political parties react to these European policies. Because the EU is a general project of economic and political integration, but is also a new polity with certain outputs and policy outcomes. The aim of this paper is to analyse the saliency of Europe in electoral and parliamentary competition in 11 parties/coalitions in Italy and Spain in three broad policy domains, Foreign, Economic and Social policies. Thus, what is the importance parties give to Europe? Does it vary from electoral to parliamentary competition? Why do parties enact or downplay the European issue in political competition? For answering these questions, this paper is structured as follows. In the first part, a necessarily brief a review of the current debate on Europeanisation and political parties will be done. Then the main theories, hypotheses and research design will be explained. The second part is the empirical analysis of Europeanisation and political conflict focusing on the evolution in time, the different policies analysed and on individual parties. Finally, different conclusions of the empirical analysis will be assessed.
|
