Paolo Dardanelli, "Europeanization as Heresthetics: Party Competition over Self-Government for Scotland, 1974-97," Party Politics, 15 (January, 2009), 49-68.

First paragraph:
Over the past decade or so, scholars in the field of European politics, broadly understood, have been paying growing attention to the domestic impact of European integration, a process termed 'Europeanization'. In other words, this term refers to how the European Union (EU) influences 'policy, polity and politics' in each of its constituent states, i.e. the nature and content of public policy (policy), the constitutional and institutional architecture of the system (polity) and the issues and actors in the political process (politics). While its subject matter is not in itself new, the Europeanization literature has rapidly grown and now constitutes a substantial sub-field of the discipline. However, not all aspects of the process of Europeanization have received the same volume of attention. By and large, scholars have so far focused primarily on 'policy' as opposed to 'polity and politics' and have privileged some theoretical approaches over others. As a result, important aspects of the process, as well as the theoretical tools appropriate to study them, have yet to be fully explored in the literature. This applies in particular to political parties and to patterns of competition between them, which have attracted less attention than they deserve. The article addresses this gap by identifying a novel Europeanization mechanism with a potentially wideranging impact on political parties and by applying it empirically to a case of domestic party competition, with the objective of broadening our understanding of how the European dimension affects parties at the domestic level.

Figures and Tables:

Box 1. Preference orders 1979

Box 2. Preference orders 1997

Last Paragraph:
This article has sought to contribute to the debate on the Europeanization of political parties by identifying new dynamics and conceptual tools and by applying them empirically. In particular, it has sought to demonstrate that Europeanization does not only place constraints on parties at the domestic level but, under certain conditions, can be a competitive resource for them. Much, however, remains to be done to explore fully how parties adapt to the changing context brought about by the ongoing process of European integration. Further developing the approaches and concepts employed here appears to this author as a promising way to advance our understanding of the domestic effects of European integration. Most fruitful, in particular, would be empirical analyses of how parties engaged in other forms of competition utilized the European dimension to their advantage or otherwise.