In modern democracy elections serve as a mechanism to connect the policy preferences of the voters to public policy. Political parties play a key role in this connection process. At election time they offer alternative programmes to electors, and by voting for the party that best represents their policy preferences, voters assure that the composition and indirectly the decisions of Parliament reflect their policy preferences. This does not seem to be the case at the European level, however, and in this sense it may be argued that European elections are thereby failing to connect people’s policy preferences to the decision-making process in the European Parliament. According to the dominant framework, EP elections are second-order elections, or, in essence, national elections: they are not about the personalities and parties at the European level or the direction of the EU policy agenda; they are fought on domestic rather than European issues and topics and political parties collude to keep the issue of Europe off the domestic agenda. This article represents a contribution to the debate over the Europeanisation of political parties, party election manifestos and EP elections in general. It explores the extent of Europeanisation in political parties represented in the European Parliament by means of an analysis of party election manifestoes. The extent of Europeanisation in these documents is analyzed using a bi-dimensional conceptualization developed by Havlik and Vykoupilova. The first dimension is called the quantitative dimension, assesses the space taken by the topic of European integration in each manifesto. The second one is called the qualitative dimension. This, using the analysis of content, measures the degree to which the European integration issue is elaborated in the programs. Using this conceptualization, we analyze the election manifestoes of several Czech political parties in the period 2004-2009.
