Europeanization and Icelandic political parties

[From the introduction]. The purpose of this paper is to investigate Icelandic intra-party politics through the lens of principal-agent relationships. In particular, I examine the divergence between power relationships in “domestic” politics and EU politics. The main finding is that this discrepancy is large. After explaining why this is so, in the final section of the paper I discuss what this implies for representative democracy as a direct chain from voters to parliament to the executive and the civil servants. The empirical data in this paper builds on published work and on a set of 15 semi-structured interviews with MPs and party managers that I conducted in Iceland in March 2007. In a later version of the paper, detailed distinctions will be made between these interviews. For now, however, the interviews are presented as a whole and only the main themes of these interviews are reported. (The individual interviews are not referenced in this version of the paper.