Forum Section
Political Parties, Public
Opinion and European
Integration in
Post-Communist Countries
The State of the Art
Robert Rohrschneider
Indiana University, USA
Stephen Whitefield
University of Oxford, UK
A B S T R A C T
The accession of post-Communist states to the European
Union has important implications for EU governance and for
our understanding of the political dynamics of integration
processes. Existing literature, we argue, may be inadequate,
primarily because it has assumed basic value consensus at
mass and elite levels over market structures and the
predominance of instrumental reasoning about integration.
Neither of these assumptions, however, is tenable for postCommunist
states. We seek, therefore, to develop an alternative
theoretical framework for understanding the integration
of post-Communist societies and point to promising
avenues for future empirical research.
1 4 1
European Union Politics
DOI: 10.1177/1465116506060915
Volume 7 (1): 141–160
Copyright© 2006
SAGE Publications
London, Thousand Oaks CA,
New Delhi
K E Y W O R D S
᭿ European integration
᭿ instrumental reasoning
᭿ political parties
᭿ political values
᭿ post-Communism
᭿ public opinion
Introduction
The accession of 10 new countries to the European Union (EU) on 1 May 2004
marked the beginning of a new era for Europe. For the eight new members
from post-Communist states, accession was the culmination of a monumental
transformation barely 15 years after they began to institutionalize marketbased
democracies following the demise of Communist regimes. In contrast
to the euphoria of 1989, the moment of accession itself was characterized by
widespread uncertainty in Eastern Europe, lack of enthusiasm, and growing
public and elite skepticism about the consequences of EU membership. The
central concern of this review article is to investigate whether the current state
of the literature is able to explain how publics evaluate integration in the new
post-Communist member states.
The inclusion of new states in the European Union is likely to have
dramatic consequences for the EU itself. Virtually every aspect of the evolving
EU polity must be shaped and reshaped in the years to come, including its
market institutions and political system, both at the level of nation-states and
at the supranational level. And, crucially, the character of popular opinion
and party competition in post-Communist Eastern Europe is likely to have a
distinct and new impact on how the EU evolves, and may lead to far greater,
and more ideologically divided, policy contestation in EU institutions.
In our view, existing integration scholarship does not provide an
adequate theoretical framework to deal with the consequences of eastward
expansion. This is because post-Communist societies have characteristics that
differentiate them from states that were involved in previous stages of
European integration. Indeed, we believe that the inclusion of postCommunist
states in the EU may lead us to rethink our understanding of the
dynamics and consequences of the integration process as a whole. This article,
therefore, lays out what we know about the integration process in the postCommunist
region, and where we see the most important gaps.
Our starting point is the surprising results of our analysis on support for
the EU and economic integration among citizens and political parties in 13
post-Communist states, undertaken in the first half of the 1990s (Rohrschneider
and Whitefield, 2004, 2006). Even in the early 1990s, we were already
encountering a strong kernel of Euroskepticism in a threefold pattern of
growing opposition to integration.
First, publics and elites strongly supported the idea of integration with
the West and the EU in general, although they were skeptical about specific
integration instruments, such as the presence of foreign companies in their
nations. Second, more often than not, citizens opposed aspects of integration
because they disagreed with the normative premises of the integration process,
European Union Politics 7(1)1 4 2
particularly the market values underlying the EU’s common market. Third,
party political mobilization around integration issues appeared to be more
powerful and polarized in states with greater experience of democratic and
economic reform processes.
Subsequently, in the second half of the 1990s and increasingly up to the
moment of accession, political parties began to channel this growing dissatisfaction
into the political arena. The growth of Euroskeptic parties in the region
attests to the crumbling consensus among elites about the desirability of EU
enlargement (Taggart and Szczerbiak, 2004). This combination of public and
elite Euroskepticism, based on distinct normative commitments as well as
calculations about costs and benefits, is unlikely to disappear. Rather, these
particular features of post-Communist politics have now been incorporated
into EU governance.
How exactly do citizens and parties in the region frame the debates about
accession? What are the dimensions over which integration may be contested
and which dimensions are most likely to be activated politically in the postCommunist
context?
We next consider how issues of political and economic integration should
be conceptualized theoretically. Further, we show how much more progress
actually is needed to advance our understanding of how publics and parties
evaluate these different integration dimensions.
What shapes the politics of European integration?
How can we explain support for, and growing opposition to, EU enlargement
and other supranational economic and political institutions among citizens
in post-Communist Eastern Europe? What are the most relevant dimensions
on which integration is likely to be contested?
How citizens and parties respond to these questions is clearly affected
by their economic, social, institutional, and historical circumstances.
Moreover, just as parties take public preferences into account in deciding how
to compete, citizens are likely to be shaped in their views and political
behavior by the way in which integration issues are taken up by political
elites. Surprisingly few studies, however, have systematically investigated
citizens’ or parties’ responses to integration, or how parties frame European
integration in domestic political debates. This section considers each of these
questions and seeks to develop a broader understanding of the politics of
European integration in post-Communist states.
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 4 3
Conceptualizing integration
First, we consider the range of integration issues facing citizens and political
parties in post-Communist Europe. What are the dimensions of the integration
process that publics are faced with, and which ones are more or less likely
to be politicized and contested?
Our view of the structure of integration issues is presented in Table 1. We
distinguish two dimensions: economic versus political; and ideal-typical
versus performance. We are guided in making these distinctions by transition
research, which indicates the importance of separating politics from economics
and the ideal-typical from the actual performance of institutions (Evans
and Whitefield, 1995; Fuchs and Klingemann, 2002; Rohrschneider, 2002).
Consequently, political and economic integration ideals are distinguished
from the existing institutional arrangements of the EU. By keeping these
dimensions distinct, we are able to focus theoretically on the various bases
on which citizens may make judgments about integration, or on which parties
may choose to position themselves. This distinction also helps us understand
where Western-based theories fall short in illuminating the likely dynamics
in the post-Communist context.
Specifically, we note that the European Union has developed on the basis
of a commitment to a set of broad economic and political normative ideals:
economically, this means support for liberal markets, which includes migration
of workers and of capital; politically, the EU implies transferring (or
pooling) sovereignty to a supranational government via new legislative, executive
and judicial institutions. Support for the EU should, therefore, reflect
attitudes towards these political and economic ideals.
At the same time, the EU involves a set of expectations about outcomes
in both the political and economic spheres. In order to create a single economic
market, the EU promises to improve economic performance and social
welfare. Similarly, its political arrangements, including subsidiarity and
supranational regulation of some aspects of domestic policy, promise to
improve citizens’ sense of the quality of governance.
To understand support for the EU in post-Communist states, therefore,
we need to examine what kind of ideals and expectations citizens and parties
envisage at the EU level. There is plenty of evidence that citizens are often
quite supportive of a new and unknown order, both in the context of markets
(Duch, 1993) and in political contexts (Evans and Whitefield, 1995; Whitefield
and Evans, 2001). However, when markets and democracies are implemented,
the rough-and-tumble of these institutions may create a harsh reality that could
lead to a decline in mass support for them. That this dynamic appears to work
in the context of supranational regional integration may be consistent with the
European Union Politics 7(1)1 4 4
growing skepticism about the EU in accession countries. Given this argument,
we note that there is a surprising lack of analyses that examine these aspects
of the integration process. We could not find any study that systematically
conceptualizes citizens’ integration ideals and the factors that might affect their
formation.
Public support for integration
Importantly, the distinctions between politics and economics, and between
ideals and performance evaluations, help to illuminate why some of the
central premises pervading Western-based research may not apply in Eastern
Europe. Most studies of support for international integration have focused
on Western Europe and North America, where market economies were
already in place prior to integration. In Eastern Europe, by contrast, elites and
many members of the public saw European integration as a mechanism for
the consolidation of new market, democratic and even state structures that
continue, in important respects, to be contested by significant sections of
public opinion (see Rohrschneider and Whitefield, 2006). In our view, this
difference of context has important implications for understanding public attitudes
and requires a shift away from much of the existing literature developed
on the two most prominent cases of international integration – the EU prior
to recent post-Communist state accession and the North American Free Trade
Association (NAFTA).
The evolution of the European Union in Western Europe in particular
stimulated intense theorizing and debate about the motivations and dynamics
involved in how citizens evaluate the supranational framework. Competing
schools within this literature explain the drive to integration in different ways:
the push of state interests (intergovernmentalism); the need to remove market
distortions between sectors at different stages of integration (functionalism);
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 4 5
Table 1 Conceptualizing integration dimensions
Economy Polity
Ideals Liberal markets Supranational
institutions
Evaluations Economic benefits Democratic and
institutional
performance
or the dynamics of interest group pressure, including political parties (neofunctionalism)
(George, 1996). Despite differences among these theories, they
share the assumption that liberal-democratic and market values underlie the
integration process (Hooghe, 2001).
Nevertheless, the normative premises of the integration process have
seldom been questioned. It is widely assumed that citizens and parties both
share commitment to market norms, and it is consequently argued that
citizens’ attitude towards integration depends on market benefits. Instrumental
reasoning, in these contexts, has dominated the scholarship, with the
success of European integration being seen as having resulted from the excess
of (perceived) winners over losers. Although some analysts in the West have
pointed to the role of party elites in generating public resistance to integration
(Anderson, 1998; Franklin and McLaren, 1994), postmaterial values and
left–right ideology (Inglehart, 1977), or the quality of national institutions
(Rohrschneider, 2002; Sánchez-Cuenca, 2000), none of these examines how
normative commitments to market and liberal-democratic ideals affect how
citizens perceive integration.
The literature on integration and enlargement in Eastern Europe to date
has usually followed the standard West European/North American model.
This instrumentalist approach assumes that EU enlargement to Eastern
Europe would be relatively easily achieved politically because it was based
on strong elite and mass commitment to market values and, even more so,
on favorable economic calculations, at least for the potential entrants. We note
that there exist differences within the existing Western literature regarding
how winners and losers from integration should be theorized – some analysts
point to the importance of individual economic attributes such as education
and the employment sector (Scheve, 2000; Scheve and Slaughter, 2001), while
others, arguing from a trade theoretical perspective, have focused on the
importance of national skill levels for trade integration (Rogowski, 1989). The
latter perspective might suggest that greater advantages from integration
accrue to the less developed post-Communist economies of the former Soviet
Union, but little direct testing of this proposition has been undertaken for
East European economies. In practice, most analyses of EU support in
Eastern Europe have focused on economic winners and losers from integration
(Tucker et al., 2002) and this has led to the conclusion that the less
developed states are regarded as the most problematic for the European
project, both because market values are thought to be weakly embedded and
because individual economic calculations are considered to be less favorable.
These parts of post-Communist Eastern Europe have been correspondingly
discounted as potential integration partners. Although some analysts allude
to the role of political values in driving support for integration, their reliance
European Union Politics 7(1)1 4 6
on the Central Candidate Barometers surveys precludes them from systematically
testing instrumental and value-based explanations (Christin, 2005;
Cichowski, 2000).1
Our own research, however, suggests that these ‘instrumental’ views of
integration do not apply well to post-Communist publics (Rohrschneider and
Whitefield, 2004). The practice of democratic politics in Eastern Europe shows
that this neat picture is difficult to support. In particular, we find that East
Europeans are much more likely to make judgments about integration based
on their underlying economic values than on expected material payoffs. This
does not mean that instrumental factors are of no importance but they are of
comparatively little importance. For example, employment sector and even
direct personal experiences and future expectations about economic performance
are of limited significance, as are country-level economic factors such as
trade integration and foreign direct investment levels. Moreover, our analysis
does not find the sort of differences between developed and less developed
economies in either direction that the two instrumentalist perspectives lead
us to expect.
Rather, we find that economic and political values are of greater importance
to how citizens across post-Communist Eastern Europe judge integration.
This result is particularly significant given that transition research
informs us that citizens’ economic and political values in Eastern Europe,
unlike in the West, are often incompatible with markets and, to some degree,
with liberal democratic values.2 However, because of the prevailing consensus
in Western-based scholarship, value-based predictors of integration are,
with few exceptions, largely ignored by this research (Inglehart, 1990; Wessels,
1995).3 It is therefore possible, indeed likely, that public opinion in the postCommunist
context about integration is driven by factors that were irrelevant
in the context of Western Europe’s stable democracies and affluence. To be
clear, we are not arguing that instrumental variables are entirely irrelevant.
We do note, however, that a near-exclusive focus on trade theory or other
instrumentalist approaches likely misses an important element – perhaps the
central one – in modeling EU support in post-Communist countries.
There thus is a clear need to broaden the range of possible factors that
may account for how the public responds. In the post-Communist context
where system-level transition is at stake, these would include not just
economic benefits but also regime ideals, both economic and political.
Moreover, in Eastern Europe, where in many cases state structures are themselves
relatively new and contested both internally and externally, views
about national independence may also be important determinants.4 We therefore
consider a range of possible influences on public opinion and we argue
that citizens’ individual economic experiences as well as their ideological
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 4 7
values (of various sorts) affect public views about integration in the postCommunist
context.
Regime ideals
Our analysis of support for foreign ownership and the EU suggests that ideological
values matter enormously in evaluating aspects of the integration
process. An account of mass views that takes values seriously would start
from the premise that ideological values define individuals’ ideal-typical
orders and reflect the preferred procedures through which these ideals ought
to be accomplished (Almond and Verba, 1963). As such, they are likely to be
of greatest relevance in the circumstances of revolutionary political and
economic transformation experienced in Eastern Europe. Importantly, ideological
values also help individuals to evaluate issues in situations where
information is not readily available, experience is limited, and societal
phenomena are transient (Sniderman et al., 1993). We would suggest that it
is precisely the East European context that creates a situation in which values
should become most relevant to citizens. Publics in these highly volatile
contexts in all likelihood lack information and experience in evaluating
market-based issues purely on the basis of their costs and benefits. Instead,
in new and transient environments, citizens are likely to resort to their longterm
predispositions in sorting out the pros and cons of supranational
markets and political regimes.
From this perspective, it is noteworthy that citizens in post-Communist
societies continue to endorse economically socialist ideals (Fuchs and Roller,
1998; Miller et al., 1995). Thus, citizens may apply their views about the
domestic economy, which to a considerable degree represent socialist views,
in appraising various aspects of the emerging international markets. If socialist
values matter, they may well reduce public support for economic integration.
For, if one rejects the idea of a market economy, one is not likely to
endorse economic integration that is justified by a desire to strengthen market
relationships. Socialist ideals (e.g. in favor of an egalitarian society) may also
reduce support for a future, Europe-wide polity if it does not secure egalitarian
outcomes. Conversely, those who support market reforms may
welcome the involvement of international corporations in the domestic
economy. Thus, one crucial arena that needs to be examined is the extent to
which ideological values influence mass evaluations of the EU.
Regime performance
This set of predictors focuses on citizens’ experience with new democracies
and markets in Eastern Europe. The expectations here are premised on the
European Union Politics 7(1)1 4 8
idea that evaluation of the EU will in part be influenced by how well national
markets and democratic regimes are perceived to work. Transition research
indicates that public evaluations of national market institutions and democratic
regimes are heavily shaped by their current performance (Evans and
Whitefield, 1995; Hofferbert and Klingemann, 1999; Mishler and Rose, 2001).
Prior research also informs us that publics compare the current regime with
the performance of the collapsed Communist regime (Mishler and Rose,
1997). Given this insight from transition research, we expect mass support for
integration to depend, in part, on how well national regimes work.
Surprisingly, few analyses in the literature consider how post-Communist
publics view a second transition within their lifespan. Consider that integration
entails that national institutions will be partly replaced with a
supranational framework. That is, a little over a decade after Communist
regimes were replaced with markets and liberal democracies, publics now
face another transition. In turn, we expect that the performance of national
regimes influences views about the EU. The better national systems perform,
the more reluctant citizens will be to abandon national institutions for the EU.
Ironically, this expectation may magnify the degree of opposition to integration
in accession countries since these are also the ones that are the most
democratic and the most successful in implementing market reforms. The
extent to which citizens compare the current regime with the potential gains
from the EU beyond economic benefits is an area largely ignored by integration
research in the area. We consider this a promising and important area for
future research.5
Economic experience
We argued above that the literature to date on this subject has emphasized
the economically instrumental character of reasoning about these questions.
Support is presumed to be generated from the expected gains from developing
markets or, once the integration process has begun, from redressing the
advantages accorded to lead sectors. Public support and, obviously, opposition
from the losers in the process, are expressed via interest groups and
through political parties.
A broad version of this sort of explanation (Anderson, 1998; Christin,
2005; Eichenberg and Dalton, 1993; Gabel, 1998) suggests that citizens make
decisions about economic policy based on an extrapolation from past
economic conditions to what the future may bring. In principal, the logic here
is straightforward. When citizens evaluate economies positively, the idea of
integration is more appealing than when market reforms are assessed negatively.
If citizens also blame (or credit) the incumbent government for
economic conditions, they react accordingly. This process is not limited to
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 4 9
national governments. When citizens believe that the common market brings
about affluence, support for the EU increases because, as Eichenberg and
Dalton put it, ‘if the EC has promised anything, it has promised the enhancement
of member states’ economic welfare’ (1993: 510).
Another micro-level model favored by the political economy literature
emphasizes (a) the individual capacity of citizens to engage with the international
economy, which is particularly influenced by age and education
levels, and (b) the sectoral locations of citizens (Gabel, 1998; Scheve and
Slaughter, 2001). Age and education matter because of the relative flexibility
that each is expected to impart to individuals in adapting to new working
and labor market conditions. Education also matters because of the cognitive
skills it implies – not only greater knowledge of global markets but also
language and technical skills.
A final variant in this group emphasizes how the vulnerability of individuals’
attitudes towards economic fluctuations affects their views about
economic structures. The more one expects to benefit (suffer) from changes
in economic systems, the more likely one is to support (oppose) such changes.
As one EU analyst puts it, ‘EU membership provides significant economic
gains and losses to skilled and unskilled workers depending on their position
in the EU labor market’ (Gabel, 1998: 938). Likewise, workers in industries
adversely affected by NAFTA are less inclined to support the free trade zone
in North America (Scheve and Slaughter, 2001). This area is probably best
understood based on the research conducted in Western Europe, though it
remains unclear to what extent instrumental considerations play the same
role in post-Communist countries.
Nationalism and ethnicity
Two other social and attitudinal factors may also be expected to play an
important role in Eastern Europe. Save for one recent analysis (Hooghe and
Marks, 2005), nationalism and ethnicity are rarely considered as independent
factors motivating support for the EU in Western Europe (for example, they
are not even mentioned in the indexes of two important contributions to EU
analyses – George, 1996; Moravcsik, 1998), yet there are reasons to believe
that their effects are more powerful in Eastern Europe (Zielonka, 2002).
First, by comparison with Western Europe, post-Communist states are
characterized by high ethnic diversity. All accession countries, except
Hungary, Poland and Slovenia, have significant minorities. This may induce
a shift away from economic concerns to a focus on the ways in which supranational
bodies might support minorities’ political aspirations – which will
therefore also produce consequences for the politics of majorities.
European Union Politics 7(1)1 5 0
The second factor concerns the recent history of supranational rules in
states in the region. All accession countries except Slovenia – which was in
any case, arguably, subordinate within Yugoslavia – were formally part of the
Soviet bloc or the Soviet Union itself, and were more or less (Czechoslovakia
and Romania) dominated by it politically and economically. Political mobilization
against Communist power in every state was to a significant degree
nationalist in character, though the form of nationalism varied in terms of the
push to inclusion in broader international economic and especially political
structures, including the EU and NATO. We may therefore expect support for
nationalism to have a complex and possibly independent relationship to EU
enlargement and integration. In some cases, integration may be seen as a
means of consolidating national independence (Whitefield et al., 2006). In
other cases, particularly in Russia, Moldova and Ukraine, the integration of
neighboring states in the EU or NATO may be seen as threatening to national
independence (Whitefield, 2006). The effects of nationalism and ethnic
division, therefore, need to be considered separately.
The role of political parties
We noted earlier that the literature on economic and political integration in
post-Communist states has paid little systematic analytical attention to the
effects of party competition on public support. Even in the context of Western
Europe, this question has only recently emerged within the literature (see
Carrubba, 2001; Ray, 2003; Steenbergen and Jones, 2002). This lacuna is
surprising given the theory and evidence of party effects in other areas, such
as globalization (Garrett, 1998), the cleavage literature and the considerable
literature on party identification (Dalton et al., 1984; Dalton and Wattenberg,
2000; Franklin, 1992). The lack of attention to party effects is perhaps more
surprising given that one of the most developed studies of post-Communist
parties is to be found in an analysis of the impact of national context on the
varying issue bases of politics in Eastern Europe (Kitschelt et al., 1999). We
therefore consider a variety of ways in which the structure of party competition
and the characteristics of parties themselves may have an impact on how
integration issues are framed for citizens.
First, the comparative literature points to the existence of distinctive party
‘families’ (Duverger, 1954; Mair and Mudde, 1998), which divide socially and
ideologically – social-democratic, Communist, liberal, agrarian, religious,
nationalist, etc. – in ways that may have consequences for how integration
matters to voters. Supporters of a particular party family, regardless of
country, may be expected to relate integration issues to the ideological and
social characteristics of the party (Hix, 2002; Marks et al., 2002). On the other
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 5 1
hand, and in line with our reasoning above about the importance of country
context, the relationship of party family (as well as other party characteristics)
to citizens’ attitudes towards EU integration may depend on, and interact
with, national economic and social conditions. For example, some evidence
from West European politics indicates that national factor endowments and
‘varieties of capitalism’ have a significant impact on individual support for
European integration. Therefore, the extent to which the EU is seen as desirable
to parties and their voters may partly depend on whether the EU is to
the left or right of the national status quo (Brinegar and Jolly, 2005; Ray, 2004).
The relationship of national economic and social circumstances to how party
families frame integration issues in post-Communist states is clearly a subject
worthy of further research, particularly given evidence of the importance of
parties in shaping welfare strategies (Lipsmeyer, 2002).
More generally, party systems as a whole differ in the extent to which
they focus on economic, social, ethnic, or other issues. These differences need
not result exclusively from public preferences, but may arise from characteristics
of the mode of transition (Kitschelt et al., 1999) that become institutionalized
in the parties. Parties may also choose to highlight issues in order to
avoid competing on questions of central concern to sections of the electorate
(McLean, 2001).
The effect of party presentation, however, may be to change the ways in
which integration and enlargement issues are packaged with other ideological
dimensions. Where economic issues dominate party competition, for
example, integration is likely to be principally an economic question. Where
nationalist issues dominate, integration and enlargement will to a greater
extent take on these ideological clothes. Because the post-Communist public
is divided on economic values, however, when economic issues dominate
party competition and structure discussion of integration and enlargement,
the activation of economic values is likely to be more pronounced.
Similarly, parties (and party systems) differ in the extent to which they
are based at all on ideological appeals, as opposed to clientelistic or charismatic
relations with the electorate (Kitschelt et al., 1999). The causes of such
differences are not well established, but their consequences for the structure
of public support are likely to be distinct and independent of the precise forms
of programmatic competition. Because programmatic party competition of
any sort (economic, social, nationalist) involves justification of policy in terms
of collective benefits, it is likely to produce a greater focus on structured issue
division. Clientelistic competition, by contrast, operates through the distribution
of particular benefits and is thus less ideological, and charismatic
competition, at the extreme, implies wholly personalized non-issue-based
politics. This is not at all to say that clientelistic or charismatic forms of
European Union Politics 7(1)1 5 2
competition have no impact on party stances and party divisions on important
integration issues; indeed, some recent literature suggests that these forms
of party competition are likely to have a systematic impact on trade policy
(Grossman and Helpman, 1994). Rather, we suggest, parties (and party
systems) with programmatic competition are more likely to be based on
values. As a consequence, parties are more likely to polarize on integration
and enlargement, with the result that support for integration and enlargement
is likely to be lower and values more mobilized than is the case in
patronage-based or charismatic conditions.
Secondly, parties may be differentiated by organizational type, based on
the relationships between members, activists and leaders (Duverger, 1954;
Kitschelt, 1989). Such organizational differences in the level of membership
involvement are likely to affect the breadth of a party’s appeal, with catchall
parties appealing more broadly and ideologically to the electorate than
parties appealing to narrower and particularized sets of constituents. As a
result, differences are to be expected in the extent to which integration issues
are connected to other attitude dimensions and in levels of polarization and
consequently in support.
Third, research in many contexts has shown that party identifiers are
more likely, by comparison with others, to adapt their position to that taken
by their party leadership. We note in this regard that partisan identification
among many East European electorates is now similar to that found in more
established democracies – where identification has fallen (Dalton and Wattenberg,
2000). We should therefore expect to find significant differences between
party identifiers and others in the ways in which they view integration issues,
whether in the salience attached to issues, the extent of overall structure in
their attitudes derived from greater awareness of party stances, or the direction
of their support. Thus, a fourth promising arena for future research is to
examine party positions on European integration in post-Communist Europe
– and how party positions affect the way citizens think about integration.
A cost-mobilization model
The points made above about the dimensions of the integration issues facing
post-Communist Eastern Europe, the sources of citizens’ support and opposition,
the impact of parties and the party system on the framing of integration,
and the effects of national context and conditions come together in what we
call a ‘cost-mobilization’ model of the politicization of European integration.
The premise of the cost-mobilization model is that integration issues may
be affected by the ways in which citizens become acquainted with the respective
policy via the democratic process – and, in line with the discussion above,
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 5 3
how this interacts with their underlying values. In Eastern Europe, this may
entail political entrepreneurs who oppose market reforms mobilizing mass
sentiment against integration, especially during elections; supporters will
mobilize their camp. EU opponents may mobilize opposition to accession
criteria that include deepening of the integration process. These debates, in
turn, may mean that citizens are exposed to competing elite cues about such
issues as foreign ownership, free migration of workers, or the degree to which
nation-states yield decision-making authority to the EU.
In turn, elite competition often mobilizes mass sentiments on both sides
of an issue (McClosky and Zaller, 1984; Zaller, 1992) and may increase uncertainty
about the benefits of the policy and therefore reduce support for it
(Marks et al., 2006; Rohrschneider and Whitefield, 2006). We are not suggesting
that party competition entirely determines how citizens think about the
EU. Obviously, economic experiences and ideological predispositions in part
affect how parties frame the issue in the first place. But we would argue that
the specific manifestation that party systems give to latent societal conflicts
influences how much weight citizens attach to various experiences and
predispositions. Consequently, party competition may directly affect how
publics evaluate the EU, and may mediate the salience of individual-level
factors in how citizens view the EU.
Conclusion
The study of political and economic integration is one of the most important
issues facing contemporary political science. As a scholarly field, however,
integration studies have been understandably linked with particular experiences,
especially that of the development of the European Union to the end
of the Cold War. Our argument is that this framework needs to be rethought
and new research questions addressed if an adequate understanding of the
dynamics of integration involving post-Communist states – and arguably of
many other integration contexts – is to be achieved.
Against expectations from Western experience as applied to postCommunist
circumstances, we find that instrumental assessments of international
market institutions are not the main basis on which integration is
judged by publics in Eastern Europe. Rather, to understand post-Communist
societies it is essential to explore the values underlying citizens’ assessment
of the EU, for example their commitment to market norms or certain forms
of democratic structures.
The factors we highlight for post-Communist EU integration raise
important questions about the character and stability of East European and
European Union Politics 7(1)1 5 4
EU politics. Values, by definition, tend to be sticky and, though updated
occasionally in light of evidence, also operate as prisms through which people
interpret the world and define their economic interests. This framing may
strengthen support for integrationist policies and diminish the effect of the
costs of adjustment to such policies. On the other hand, the corollary to this
may be the intractability of opposition to EU integration. Given the endogeneity
of economic interests in this context, opponents of the policy may
well even consider instrumentalist claims for the EU to be part of an ideological
package that they reject. Thus, the ‘technocratic’ basis on which
membership was sold may become a further source of antipathy to the integration
project (Grzymala-Busse and Innes, 2003). Even if the project goes
well economically, the economic integration of Eastern Europe is likely to be
politically contested for the foreseeable future in ideological rather than
‘normal’ distributional terms. In short, scholars ought to account for both
instrumental and value-based explanations in future analyses of EU support
in post-communist countries.
Our analysis also raises questions about economic integration and
democracy that are increasingly familiar in a range of contexts. In noting that
democratic political opportunities and integration experience foster mobilization
against economic integration, we clearly do not wish to make a case
against democracy. But the evidence does point to its tensions. Studies of the
relationship between democracy and economic reform in Eastern Europe
have produced ambiguous conclusions in part because of the difficulties of
disentangling the syndrome of associated characteristics in economically
successful and unsuccessful states (Frye and Mansfield, 2003; Hellman, 1998).
Our analysis does not show that less democratic states are more likely to
pursue integrationist economic policies; but it does show that party competition
in democracies may make integration more difficult politically because
democratic environments allow for controversies that, at least in the short
term, may turn out to be particularly challenging to economic liberals and
supporters of international markets.
The final practical point concerns the implications of our analysis for the
European Union itself. Democratic mobilization against integration is high in
countries that were initially in the first wave of EU accession; and the image
of the EU is the least favorable in these nations. The European Union is therefore
likely to be a source of polarization of politics in Eastern Europe.
Moreover, politicians able to tap into opposition to European accession may
win increasing support as the realities of EU membership become more
tangible. Although the ideal of EU membership may have been widely shared
by many publics, the reality of accession may increasingly bring into sharper
relief the tension between the market-based premise of integration and the
Rohrschneider and Whitefield Political Parties, Public Opinion and European Integration 1 5 5
economically socialist values of many citizens in these states. How citizens
respond to integration and how elites frame the benefits and downsides of
integration may thus become more contentious than is so often presumed and
may significantly complicate the already complex and contested nature of EU
governance.
Notes
Robert Rohrschneider would like to acknowledge the warm hospitality of the
Transatlantic Center of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Brussels;
Stephen Whitefield would like to acknowledge the tremendous support of the
Leverhulme Foundation. Data for the expert survey used in this paper were
obtained with a grant from the Nuffield Foundation project ‘Political Mobilization
and Elite Framing in Generating Support for Supra-National Institutions and
European Union Enlargement in Post-Communist Eastern Europe’, Grant
Number: SGS/00827/G.
1 Both analyses recognize that values may affect how citizens evaluate the integration
process. Neither study, however, is able to include value indicators
in the analyses because the surveys lack measures for citizens’ normative
commitments.
2 A consistent pattern in transition research is that, although publics in postCommunist
systems support liberal-democratic rights in the abstract, citizens
also hold societal ideals that are to some degree incompatible with liberal
democracies. See, among others, Fuchs and Roller (1998) and Gibson (1993).
3 Given that a ‘value-based’ approach to integration has not been tested in
Western Europe, it remains an open question how adequate the ‘instrumentalist’
account is even in these circumstances.
4 For a discussion of the importance of nationalism in some post-Communist
states for European and international integration, see Whitefield et al. (2006)
and Whitefield (2006).
5 Evidence from the Baltic states suggests that evaluations of the performance
of national institutions were consistently the most important predictor of
stances towards European integration. See Whitefield et al. (2006).
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About the authors
Robert Rohrschneider is professor at the Department of Political
Science, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA.
Fax: +1 812 855 2027
E-mail: rrohrsch@indiana.edu
Stephen Whitefield is CUF Lecturer in Politics at the Department of
Politics and International Relations and Pembroke College, Oxford
University, Oxford OX1 1DW, UK.
Fax: +44 (0) 1865 276418
E-mail: stephen.whitefield@pembroke.oxford.ac.uk
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