The extent to which EU issues are able to permeate agendas of national political parties is crucially shaped by their electoral concerns. While parties have different motivations, electoral strategy becomes particularly important if issues involve political risk. The presence of EU in national political discourse has been steadily increasing. Restrained by finite agenda space, national political parties are forced to reconcile varying public pressures with the amount of attention they choose to allocate to EU issues to maximize their re-election chances. This paper examines the extent changing public attention and support for EU issues over time has an effect on the willingness of national political parties to emphasize EU issues on their agendas. We build our argument on traditional saliency theory (1983) and argue that expressed issue salience by parties responds to changes in public preferences such that parties primarily compete and attract voters by emphasizing issues that, due to changes in voter opinion, will appeal to voters (Zicha and Spanihelova, 2010). We test our argument by examining the relative attention national political parties devote to EU issues in the Netherlands since 1965 using the Comparative Agendas Projects datasets. Our analyses also aim at comparing the effect of the public on EU issue prioritization in a multitude of venues ranging from party manifestos and election campaigns, to legislative and executive agendas. This paper makes a distinct contribution to general studies of party competition by focusing on EU issues, as well as bring concrete evidence to the debates regarding the EU’s democratic deficit and the continuous de-emphasis of Europe in national political competition.
