The concept of the ‘cartel party’ first devised by Katz and Mair in their seminal article Changing Models of Party Organization and Party Democracy: The Emergence of the Cartel Party has been one of the most influential pieces of work in the field of party politics. The novelty of this concept is built on the argument that there has been an evolutionary change in the relationship between parties, state and civil society, which in effect has created a cartel party. Accordingly, in Western democracies, as of recent times, there has been a greater tendency for a closer symbiosis between the three. As a result, the boundries between the staten and political parites have become increasingly blurred and political competition is reduced to technocratic means rather than competition for alternative policies. The cartel party concept has raised a number of interesting questions regarding party competition, intra-party democracy, political representation, the rise of extremist parties, and its implications on democracy. While these studies have applied the cartel partel concept exclusively to established Western European democracies, so far nobody has studied whether we can find a similar phenomenon in new or transitioning democracies and whether we can apply the concept in these countries accordingly. From the outset, there is no reason why we should exclude 'a priori' the applicability of this concept to new or transitioning democracies. What is more interesting, a particular twist may stem from the question of how the process of securing EU membership impacts on the domestic dynamics. It is rather interesting to observe how well the concept of the cartel party applies to the dynamics of EU enlargement and the manner in which the enlargement process is administered in candidate states. A number of studies have shown that in almost all Central and East European candidate states, most major political parties responded to EU integration by adopting agendas consistent with the accession criteria. The accession process thus converged major political parties toward the ideological center, which resulted in very little difference in policy output among competing parties. The resulting outcome thus resembled technocratic competition rather than competition over alternative policies. When looking at the Europeanization literature on the new member states of Central and Eastern Europe, the findings reinforce the above observation. Existing research suggests that the manner in which the enlargement process is administered has exported the EU’s own democratic deficit, has displaced the socio-economic dimension of partisan conflict with technocratic concerns, has prevented social learning, and as a result of all this, we are only seeing a pattern of ‘shallow Europeanization’. Following from this observation this Paper asks: Does the process of European integration contribute to the formation of a cartel party in young democracies? The Paper develops a theoretical approach to testing this question by providing a preliminary set of findings in support of the question.
