Lieven De Winter and Margarita Gomez-Reino Cachafeiro,"European Integration and Ethnoregionalist Parties," Party Politics, 8 (July, 2002), 483-503.

First Paragraph:
With the exception of Lynch's seminal work, the impact of European integration on ethnoregionalist, peripheral nationalist or regionalist parties in Europe has received very little scholarly attention up until now. This lacuna is partially due to the lack of comparative research treating this group of parties as a single party family. Most comparative analyses of European parties simply omit it. This neglect is reinforced by their small representation -- in terms of seats -- in the European Parliament, which is due to several factors, including the relatively small size of the regions in which they compete, and the fragmentation of the party family (De Winter and Türsan, 1998). Yet the Democratic Party of the Peoples of Europe/European Free Alliance defines itself (along with the EPP, PES, ELDR, EFGP) as a genuine European political party (conforming to Article 191A of the Rueoprean Union Treaty), while the other four Europarties treat the DPPE-EFA as a Europarty.

Figures and Tables:
Table 1. The Democratic Party of the Peoples of Europe/European Free Alliance as a representative of a European political family (August 2001) (in brackets the number of MEPs, and for non-members of the DPPE-EFA, the parliamentary groups to which they belong)
Table 2. Non DPPE-EFA members

Last Paragraph:
EFA membership has provided the opportunity to turn Eurosceptics into moderate Eurocritics. At the elite level, changing attitudes towards the EU are, we believe, due to the new political opportunities for ethnoregionalist parties at the European level. These factors outweigh the constraints that Europeanization imposes. This pro-European stance can be clearly identified in multilevel federalist institutional proposals and the positive attitudes towards European integration of party elites. Yet, Europeanization of the party family at the elite level might not have a direct impact at the state or regional level, nor on the pro- or anti-European attitudes of their electorates.