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The aim of this study is to provide a theoretical and empirical explanation of the question: How do conflicts within a party affect its coalitional behaviour insofar as such conflicts may influence the bargaining power of party elites in the parliamentary arena. There are three major themes around which the theoretical explanation is organized. The first theme is that 'party institutionalization' and the nature of intra-party conflicts are important factors in shaping the ability of the party elites to neutralize internal conflicts. The second theme - a particular application of the first - is that the strength of a party in the parliamentary bargaining plane (i.e. its relative bargaining power) lies in its organization weakness. The third theme reveals that political parties, which are characterized by the existence of heterogeneous and diffused mechanisms for internal dissent, can handle internal conflicts in a variety of ways without forcing members to leave the party. Based upon a comparative analysis of intra-party conflicts and minority governments in Denmark, Norway, France, Italy and the U.K., the study suggests that weakly institutionalized parties can enter into conflict inducing coalition negotiations without risking their hold on their membership, whereas inter-party negotiations can lead to disintegration of highly institutionalized parties as members may be forced to leave the party as their primary mechanism for expression of discontent. A major implication of this study is that in multi-party systems in which minority situations occur, the most attractive strategy (i.e. in terms of bargaining power) for highly institutionalized parties occupying a governmental position is the formation of informal minority governments, whereas the most attractive strategy for weakly institutionalized parties is the formation of formal minority governments.

This thesis presents a critique of the partisan control thesis, a common claim in the academic literature on the European Parliament that two partisan actors - domestic political parties and the European parliamentary groups (EP Groups) - influence how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) approach representation. Specifically, it investigates whether domestic parties and EP Groups shape how MEPs think about and carry out representation, and what factors are linked to variation in the degree to which these partisan actors seek and achieve influence. Adopting a mixed-methods research design, this thesis analyses data from the 2010 EPRG survey of MEPs, and a body of original data gathered by conducting interviews with MEPs and officials. Three parties from Finland - KOK, the SDP, the PS - and three from the UK - the Conservatives, Labour, and UKIP - are selected as case studies. The MEPs examined are affiliated to one of four EP Groups, namely the EPP, the S&D, the ECR, and the EFD. This thesis finds that neither domestic political parties nor EP Groups exercise the degree of influence that the partisan control thesis suggests. Furthermore, it identifies that three factors are linked to the propensity of national parties to attempt to influence MEPs, and that a further three factors determine the desire and ability of EP Groups to influence MEPs. This thesis argues that although it is beneficial that MEPs are given the freedom by their parties to carry out their work according to their own judgment, the low levels of attention domestic parties pay to the activities of MEPs gives rise to concerns regarding the existence of an 'accountability deficit' in the EU. The pessimistic conclusion is that this deficit is unlikely to be addressed unless parties come to place greater value on goals that lie within the context of the EU's political system.

This thesis is an exploration of the EL, one of the pan-European party federations, which is concurrently one of the most recently-launched transnational parties. The work explores the theoretical literature on Europeanisation of parties and applies a three-pronged theoretical framework, involving the theoretical insights of Johansson and Raunio, Charalambous’ ‘communist dilemma’, as well as discourse analysis to the EL and some of its most important national components. These are constituted by the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left, the French Communist Party, the Spanish United Left, and the Italian Rifondazione Comunista. The analysis covers the pan- European level, seeking to reconstruct the EL’s vision of the European Union, as well as its organisational and ideological capacity to influence the Union’s direction, and its degree of institutionalisation and Europeanisation. Concurrently, it addresses the national level, involving the aforementioned case studies of Greece, France, Spain, and Italy, as well as the internal party dimension by seeking to evaluate the importance of the parties’ long-standing factions with regards to the parties’ stance towards the process of European integration. Its most salient findings relate to the high degree of convergence between the parties under analysis, both with regards to their ideological core, as well as their policy proposals, something that could initially verify the argument of policy transfer between national and European level. Moreover, the thesis findings suggest that the financial crisis that has been affecting the whole of the EU ever since 2008 has strengthened the parties’ distinct left Europeanism. Finally, the thesis’ findings suggest that there is indeed a unified political discourse of the European radical left that has been fighting for hegemony inside the EU for the last decade and that at the moment of the drafting of the present thesis has been able to create a growing consensus inside the EL with regards to the party’s future direction and to the means of bringing about the radical changes that it professes with regards to the Union’s alternative future.

Scholarly analysis has a proclivity to try and understand party behaviour through the lens of 'ideal types'. While a surfeit is available, four appear to dominate the party literature: cadre, mass, catch-all and cartel. This dissertation develops a number of arguments relating to the latter that was introduced by Katz and Mair. in 1995. Essentially proposing that party behaviour has been reflective of that shown by business cartels since 1970, the Katz/Mair model suggests that in order to survive, party cartelisation has seen specific sets of parties capturing and controlling markets of their choice.

This study is an in-depth investigation into the Christian Democratic parties of Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, focusing particularly on these parties during the 1990s. The primary intention is to give greater coverage to these oft-neglected parties through an account of political, electoral, programmatic and organisational developments. The research probes the position of the parties in the 1990s and analyses the extent to which the electoral decline of these parties after 1990 was the result of common factors as well as the role of nationally specific contextual variables. This is carried out through a consideration of the contraction of the social bases of Christian Democratic partisanship and detailed case-studies of the parties in the 1990s. The reactions of the parties to this decline are also analysed, looking specifically at strategic, programmatic and organisational changes. Historical background will also be provided by the opening chapters. Chapter two looks at Christian Democrats in the early post-war period, highlighting the rapid use of such parties and contrasting the lack of a unified Christian Democratic party in the Netherlands while chapter three investigates the reaction of the parties to the loss of national office and/or the emergence of electoral problems. In each case, programmatic and organisational adaptation occurred although as the chapter argues, by the end of the 1980s such efforts were very much marginal after the parties had re-established their position in government. Chapter four then examines the key social bases of Christian Democratic support and illustrates their long-term decline. It concludes that while such change need not necessarily result in electoral problems, there has been a decline of Christian Democratic partisanship in the electorate in the three countries. Chapters five, six and seven analyse the CDU, ÖVP and CDA in the 1990s. In each case, Christian Democrats found their position under greater threat than previously although the scale of their problems varied. Chapter eight scrutinises the development of Christian Democratic electoral programmes using the Comparative Manifestos Project dataset.

The thesis aims primarily to analyse the communication strategies of radical right parties. More specifically, the research examines three cases of radical right parties in Western Europe during the first decade of the twenty-first century with particular emphasis on the political communication along with marketing and branding techniques used to engage with the electorate to gain and maintain electoral support. These case studies comprise the Greek Popular Orthodox Rally (LA.O.S.), the Swiss People’s Party (SVP) and the Italian National Alliance (AN). Different forms of content analysis are used in order to pinpoint the characteristics that identify the parties as members of the radical right family. Through this approach the thesis provides evidence that the parties, in their effort to become more appealing to their audiences, avoid direct engagement with issues, which reflect traditional ideological tenets of the radical right issues such as fascism, racism or xenophobia. Rather, they attempt to present a more mainstream and competitive profile in the political arena. From a market-oriented perspective, the thesis addresses questions on marketing and related explanations which focus both on how the parties choose to communicate with the electorate, what is their message and, through comparative analysis, whether there are similarities in communication techniques among the three parties and whether it can be argued that parties in the radical right family project a common profile in terms of their communication strategies. Furthermore, the application of such an approach to the use of political communication techniques of the selected radical right parties can contribute to a wider understanding of how the concept of ‘consumption’ has come to be applied increasingly in activities undertaken in the political arena.

This thesis examines party-based Euroscepticism across four different national contexts in the period 2011-3 by bringing into focus right-wing populist parties. Understanding Europeanization as a label for the impact of engagement with the EU and its practical and normative influences on statecraft, policy-making, and the wider society, the thesis looks into the Europeanization of narratives of national identity, minority rights issues, immigration and citizenship. It discusses the way in which the impact of engagement with the EU is perceived as well as the nature of the arguments made against the EU’s involvement in associated policy processes. There has been a recent upsurge in Euroscepticism due to a combination of economic and political factors, on both the popular and party level in EU countries, as well as the increased blurring of the boundaries between mainstream and fringe Eurosceptics. Hence, it is important to analyze the precise reasons behind this phenomenon. The discussion focuses on “soft Euroscepticism” – the thesis is generally not interested in pondering the generic arguments against a country’s membership in supranational entities or shedding light on those parties who oppose the underlying values on which the EU project rests. The thesis therefore probes the attitudes of parties that – with the recent and partial exception of the PVV in the Netherlands – tend to emphasize relatively specific issue-areas as sources of concerns. This work is primarily based on qualitative methods - 32 elite interviews with nationalist-populist politicians including key figures such as party leaders (Rolf Schlierer, Gheorghe Funar), European Parliament representatives (Barry Madlener) and members of the National Parliament as well as of the general party councils (Ventsislav Lakov) in addition to detailed analysis of policy documentation and books authored by party representatives – and highlights and deconstructs these parties’ grievances attributable to nationalistically-oriented concerns. It includes a detailed literature review that clarifies the EU’s impacts and country-specific historical and contemporary differences in the four domains affected by “Europeanization” (Chapters 1-3) and then in Chapters 4-6 uses original empirical data to compare the attitudes of the four parties – Ataka, PRM, REP, and PVV – with regard to the issues already introduced. The thesis utilizes theoretical approaches drawn from several disciplines ranging from political science to sociology, though it mostly confines itself to those pertaining to core group or minority/ethno-regionalist nationalist mobilization, ethnic vs. civic nationalisms in Eastern vs. Western Europe, as well as the different role played by EU conditionality in relation to the political landscape on the two sides of the continent. Extrapolating from this body of research, it develops hypotheses and projections regarding the expected disconnect in viewpoints between Eastern and Western parties. The study finds that attitudes towards “Europeanized” issues areas diverge greatly and do not necessarily correlate with the extent to which EU membership as a whole is opposed by the party. In line with previous research findings, the EU’s capacity to create a super-order nationalism that could challenge conventional readings of patriotism is generally not conceptualized as a significant threat. However, the interviews did reveal that pre-existing transcendent identities – like Latin identity in the case of Romania or the Slavic one in Bulgaria - – are perceived as threatened or as being tacitly degraded due to assumed cultural biases within the EU. At the same time, the reduced salience of such identities among the members of the Western populist parties does not make them more sympathetic to Pan-Europeanism. EU effects on immigration are predictably rated as manifestly detrimental by the West European parties, because they distrust the professionalism of EU agencies and networks, dislike the Eastern Europeans’ increasing involvement in making higher-level decisions and perceive the EU as more liberally inclined than the national government in this realm (with the latter two points especially applicable to the PVV). However, it was interesting that the East Europeans also expressed some disquiet due to the EU’s supposed culpability in encouraging emigration of their own citizens and the presumed unwillingness of the EU organs to offer them the necessary financial means for combating immigration into Bulgaria across the Turkish border. However, contrary to theoretical expectations, the study suggests that there are no hard and fast rules when it comes to the populist party’s proclivity to regard the EU as an ally of “minority lobbies”, with the PVV (the most Eurosceptic party) assessing the relevancy of this aspect as minor, while it is gauged to be of fundamental importance by Ataka (less Eurosceptic than the PVV). Among CEE populists, the thesis shows how “privileged minorities” like Hungarians and Turks are viewed with alarm due to supposedly making use of the EU level in order to advance their secessionist ambitions (Hungarians in Romania) or improve their socio-economic prospects at the expense of the majority (Turks in ethnically mixed regions of Bulgaria). In short, the thesis establishes that there is still a strong dividing line between Eastern and Western populist parties in relation to the assessments made with regard to the impact of the EU on European identity, migration issues and majority-minority dynamics.