Party ideology and strategy have been identified in the comparative literature as two of the most important factors that impact party responses to Europe. However, there is an ongoing ‘ideology versus strategy’ debate about the relative importance of these factors in different national circumstances. While some authors argued that ideology decisively shapes party stances, others claimed that parties approach the issue of Europe strategically, with the majority of scholars making the case that interplay between these two variables may best account for party positions on this matter. Moreover, among those who argued for ideology as an explanatory variable, there is debate on the issues of how ideology shapes stances, to what extent socio-economic left-right dimensions of party competition may explain party stances, and can we predict parties’ stances based on their party families? The
following section addresses these questions, provides an overview of the existing literature and puts forward the working hypotheses to be tested in the cases of Serbian and Croatian parties.
There is a considerable group of scholars that made a strong case that party ideology shapes party positions on EU issues. Marks and Wilson (2000, p.433) specifically argued for ‘a cleavage theory of party response to European integration’. Their key argument is that the response of Western European political parties to European integration is filtered by historical predispositions rooted in the basic cleavages that structure political competition. In other words, the issue of European integration ‘is assimilated into pre-existing ideologies of party leaders, activists and constituencies that reflect long-standing commitments on fundamental domestic issues (Marks and Wilson 2000, p.433). They focused on the social democratic, liberal, Christian democratic and conservative party families, and argued that parties’ ideological schemas rooted in political cleavages are a
‘prism’ through which parties come to terms with European issues. These authors concluded that if one wishes to know how a political party will respond to European integration, one must pay close attention to historically embedded predispositions, particularly the ideological propensities and constituency links that arise out of the basic social cleavages.
Based on the same data, Marks, Wilson and Ray (2002) later argued that party family is a stronger causal factor than strategic competition, participation in government or the attitudes of a party’s supporters toward the EU. Marks, Wilson and Ray (2002) noted that the most pro-EU oriented party families were the liberal and Christian democratic parties, followed by the social democratic and regionalist families. The agrarian, conservative and green party families were less supportive, while the Protestant, extreme right and extreme left/communist families were the most Eurosceptic. These authors hence claimed that parties assimilate and exploit European issues within existing ideologies, which are the results of key social cleavages that give rise to party families. They concluded that the location of a party on the left-right dimension is closely associated with its position on European integration, and the effect of party family on their stances on this issue is the strongest.
Hooghe et al. (2002, p. 965) further elaborated these assumptions and demonstrated that there is a strong relationship between the conventional left-right dimension and party
positioning on European integration, since West European parties located toward the left and the right extremes are more Eurosceptic than parties oriented toward the centre.
However, these authors found that the most powerful predictor of party positioning on Europe is the ‘new politics’ dimension related to communal, environmental and cultural issues, which they operationalised as an axis between two poles, namely the GAL (green/alternative/libertarian) and the TAN (traditional/authoritarian/nationalist). They argued that the GAL/TAN axis exerts a strong, consistent effect on party positioning on European issues and structures party attitudes in the major party families, with the TAN side of the dimension driving the overall relationship. These authors found that parties near the TAN pole (radical right and right-populist) are, without exception, highly Eurosceptic, while conservative parties with a TAN inclination also tend to be Eurosceptic. They also conclude that that extreme left and extreme right parties – and, to a lesser extent, the green parties – share Euroscepticism, while parties in the political centre – including most social democratic, Christian democratic, liberal and conservative parties – are generally much more supportive of European integration. Marks et al. (2006) later examined whether the GAL/TAN model can explain party positioning on Europe both in Western and Eastern European countries. They found that Euroscepticism is prevalent among the same types of parties, namely radical left and radical TAN parties across the continent. However, the opposition to European integration in the East tends to be concentrated among parties that are, at the same time, hard left and hard TAN, whereas Eurosceptic parties in the West are either the hard socio-economic left or hard TAN parties.
Finally, Marks and Steenbergen (2002) looked at how the left-right dimension is related to party competition and stances on the EU, and they presented four possible models. The IR model assumes that the two dimensions are fully independent of each other, since contestation on EU issues has no ideological underpinning. The Hix-Lord model argues that the two dimensions coexist orthogonally, since they are unrelated and cannot be collapsed into a new single dimension given that they crosscut political coalitions. The third model assumes that these dimensions are fused in a single dimension, with the left pushing for common economic regulations, and the right favouring fewer EU regulations. Finally, they argued that the fourth model, which they appear to support, assumes that these dimensions are neither fused together nor orthogonal to each other, and that the various aspects of European integration are incorporated into one of these two dimensions. These authors thus concluded that the left-right and new politics dimensions underlie stances on the EU.
On the other side, a number of scholars contested these assumptions. Gaffney (1996, p.19) claimed, ‘the EU can in principle engender allegiance or hostility from any ideological perspective’. Batory (2008a) also argued that the issue of Europe certainly does not confirm to a single left-right dimension in a comparative perspective, while Sitter (2001, p.37) claimed that Euroscepticism emerges as a phenomenon potentially linked to a range of ideologies and that ‘it covers a multitude of ideological and interest-driven stances’. Sitter (2001) pointed out that Euroscepticism, as a product of party competition, is driven by party strategy, conceptualised as the party’s combined goals of survival, votes, policy and office. This ‘strategic’ approach to the European integration will be examined further in Chapter 4.
Taggart (1998) similarly argued that placing parties in party families does not allow us to predict with any certainty their position on the EU, since different party families adopt clearly different positions in different countries. He specifically contested that ideology alone can predict party Euroscepticism, arguing the European integration issue sits badly with the usual ways of tracing the lines of political conflict because it cuts across left-right ideological divisions. Taggart and Szczerbiak (2001) also emphasised that a party’s position on the left-right spectrum is not correlated with whether a party is Eurosceptic or not.
Although they identified a stronger tendency for Eurosceptic parties in the Central and Eastern candidate states to be on the right of the spectrum, they argued that parties from different areas of the left-right spectrum express Euroscepticism. Taggart and Szczerbiak (2001, p.21) therefore concluded that Euroscepticism in Central and Eastern Europe draws from a range of party families and ’attempting to lever the “European’’ issue into a left-right framework is at least difficult and possibly even fruitless’. In their later study, these authors further argued that there is no straightforward relationship between general party ideology and stances on Europe, since ‘it is not possible to ‘‘read off’’ a party’s position from whatever ideological family it belongs to’ (Szczerbiak and Taggart, 2008b, p.257).
However, these authors did not claim that ideology is an irrelevant explanatory factor. They rather argued that a combination of ideological and strategic factors best explain party positions on Europe. Szczerbiak and Taggart (2008b) thus suggested that underlying party positions on the issue of European integration are determined by a blend of the party’s ideology and what it perceives as the interests of its members. The relative importance of these factors, they argued, is determined by whether the party is more value-based, goal-seeking or a pragmatic, office-goal-seeking party. Batory (2002) similarly claimed that ideology
structures underlying attitudes to integration, but that parties’ predispositions are not directly translated into a corresponding policy of supporting or rejecting membership per se.
She pointed out that parties are limited when forming these attitudes by their own early pro-European rhetoric as well as short-term competitive pressures and the need to be acceptable as coalition partners. Finally, Kopecký and Mudde (2002) made the case that ideology determines a party’s support for the general ideas that underlie the EU, whereas strategy can play an important role in explaining a party’s support for the EU as it is.
This thesis argues, based on the empirical data examined, ideology is an important factor that, to a great extent, impacts party stances on the EU. In other words, parties find it difficult to disregard their fundamental values (provided they have them) when determining a position on the EU, as elaborated later in this chapter. However, if parties are primarily strategically driven or EU issues do not constitute an important element of their fundamental beliefs, parties may strategically respond to European integration, which will be discussed further in Chapter 4. Based on the key assumptions from the dominant comparative literature, which posits a strong relationship between ideology and party positions on the EU, this chapter aims to test the following hypotheses about the relationship between party ideology and attitudes towards the EU:
H1a: The more parties express a socio-economic radical right or radical left ideology, the more likely that they will adopt Eurosceptic attitudes;
H1b: The more parties express a TAN (traditional/authoritarian/nationalist)-based ideology, the more likely that they will adopt Eurosceptic attitudes (compared to parties closer to a GAN (green/alternative/libertarian) pole);
H1c: Parties that belong to the radical right, radical left or green ideological family tend to be more Eurosceptic, whereas liberal, Christian democratic and social democratic families tend to be more Euroenthusiastic.