All Roads Leading Home? A Qualitative Comparative Analysis of Belgian, Danish and Dutch Parties’ Multilevel Organisation in the EU

This article assesses how national parties organise to perform their role as political ‘bridge’ between governance levels in the EU’s complex multilevel system. It argues that parties’ organisational linkages across levels could not only strengthen the domestic position of a party, but also provide the EU with a much-needed source of democratic legitimacy. However, national parties face different incentives to (not) invest in such linkages, ranging from domestic relevance of the EU as a political issue to historical ties and traditions. Based on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) of the organisational linkages of nineteen parties in Belgium, Denmark and the Netherland, the paper not only maps important differences in parties’ multilevel organisational strategies, but also demonstrates how several different causal pathways can be identified, with interactions between EU relevance, ideology, and party type driving variation. It concludes that, while parties acknowledge the importance of the EU as a level of governance and are crucially aware of the political spillover from 'Brussels', they struggle to reach beyond the confines of the nation-state and organisationally adapt to European integration, thereby limiting their role as bridges between Europe and its citizens.