The salience of European integration to party competition : Western and Eastern Europe compared

This article seeks to contribute to the burgeoning literature on how parties assign salience to their issue stances. With regard to European integration, recent research has pointed not only to growing public Euro-scepticism but also to an increase in the importance that the public assigns to European issues. But are parties matching this shift with appropriate salience shifts of their own? The existing literature points to important constraints on parties achieving such salience representation that arise from the nature of inherited issue ownership and the nature of political cleavages. There are also reasons to expect important differences between Western European and Central European parties in the extent to which such constraints apply. We investigate these issues using data from expert surveys conducted in twenty-four European countries at two time points, 2007–2008 and 2013, that provide measures of the salience of European integration to parties along with other indicators that are used as predictors of salience. The results do not suggest that CEE parties assign salience in ways that differ substantially from their counterparts in Western Europe. What matters most in both regions is the position that parties adopt on the issues, with parties at the extremes on the European dimension being the ones to make the issue most salient in their appeals. We also note that some predicted determinants of issue salience, such as government status, electoral support and time spent in office, and party organization, are dogs that do not bark in both regions