��ɫ��Ƶ

How resistant are political parties and party systems in developed democracies to processes of economic and political integration that cross nation-state borders? This comparative project considers the effect of European integration on party systems in EU member states by examining the relationships between parties and their voters, on the one hand, and the context and conditions of interaction between political parties, on the other. It pairs large-N cross-national analyses with in-depth case studies of Italy, the UK, Slovenia, and Portugal. This talk homes in on party system change in the latter, where party system Europeanization has been more subtle than in other EU democracies. While European integration tends to place a consequential strain on the relationship between mainstream parties and their core voters, the inextricable link between democratization and Europeanization has made Portuguese voters and parties more likely to consider the EU as part and parcel of what it means to be a democracy. As a result, parties across the entire political spectrum avoid overt Euroscepticism and, instead, offer targeted criticisms of particular EU policies and notably nuanced positions on the EU as a political project. The case of Portugal thus confirms that national institutional contexts condition the effect of EU membership in meaningful ways, as they shape how voters engage with the issue of European integration and how parties respond to their concerns.

Nils Ringe is Professor and Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner Chair in the Department of Political Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he also served as Director of the Center for European Studies (2014-21), the Jean Monnet European Union Center of Excellence (2015-18), the Jean Monnet EU Center of Excellence for Comparative Populism (2019-22), and held a Jean Monnet Chair (2015-21). His research focuses on European Union politics, populism, legislative politics, language and politics, elections, political parties, and political networks. Ringe’s most recent books are “The Language(s) of Politics: Multilingual Policy-Making in the European Union” (Michigan University Press 2022) and “Populists and the Pandemic: How Populists Around the World Responded to COVID-19” (Routledge 2023, edited with Lucio Renno).