Europeanisation of Parties? Evaluating Policy Convergence and Divergence of Europarties' Members, 1979–2019

Europeanization of political parties, as envisaged by Ladrech, includes changes on the programmatic level, on the level of party organization, in terms of party competition, relations between the party and the government, as well as relations beyond the national party system. This paper focuses on programmatic change, i.e. electoral manifestos. Yet, as opposed to the Euromanifestos project, it looks at national manifestos and tries to detect patterns of convergence and divergence in key policy areas among members of the five main Europarties (EPP, PES, ALDE, ACRE, EGP). Measures of left-right positions, alternative to the RILE index, such as Franzmann & Kaiser's left-right positions and vanilla scaling by Gabel & Huber, cover only a subset of countries and elections. This paper wishes to analyze manifestos in all member states included in the Manifesto Project Dataset and to extend the timeframe to 1979 (first direct European election). Such an approach necessitates an emphasis on a handful of key variables that will enable longitudinal policy comparison. In addition, it means that one ought to find a way to measure changes in left-right positions among different members of Europarties, while bearing in mind all the challenges of evaluating ideological positions, uncovered by scholars that have long debated on the relative merits of various approaches. Existing literature emphasizes that Europarties have become more diverse since the 2004 and 2007 enlargements and speak about the impact of Europarties on national parties in those member states. This paper wishes to expand on that and test for points of convergence and divergence both before and after the great enlargement in order to detect long-term trends. In addition, these trends may be juxtaposed with key events – 1989 (Berlin Wall), 1992 (Maastricht), 1999 (euro), 2001 (9/11), 2003 (Iraq War), 2008 (Great Recession), 2009 (sovereign debt crisis), 2015 (migrant/refugee crisis).