The purpose of this thesis is to map and assess the organisational and ideological development of the European Liberal Democrat and Reform party, the ELDR. More specifically, it seeks to analyse the degree of integration between the members of the ELDR over time, to identify factors that may or may not generate integration, to relate the development of the ELDR to earlier research about European parties, and finally to contribute to the ongoing debate about whether or not the traditional national party families are about to establish parties at the European level. The thesis is based on the assumption that parties adapt to their environment, in this case, the system of multi-level governance that characterises the European Union. As the European parties are composed of national parties, they are also dependent on the member parties' opportunities and motives for cooperation. If there is integration, we can, however, not only expect the European parties to adapt to their environment. As they become independent actors, they may also influence their environment. In other words, we can anticipate interaction between the European and national levels that leads to mutual adaptation, or Europeanisation. To be able to capture the interaction between the two levels, theories from international relations and comparative politics are combined. Based on interviews, participant observation, documentary research and content analysis of European election manifestos, the analyses shows that the members of the ELDR have over time reached a rather advanced level of integration, both organisationally and ideologically. Although it is possible to identify constraining factors to this development, the ELDR has, at least from what is known from literature, reached about the same level of development as the two other European parties, the Christian democratic EPP and the Social democratic PES. The internal integration of the ELDR is the outcome of a successive transfer of power from the member parties to the ELDR. By now, the ELDR can therefore be defined as a rather independent actor and as a type of party at the European level. This type of party is, however, not comparable to national parties. It is instead adapted to the institutional structure of the European Union, with, at least partly, a different organisation and different functions from those of national parties. / digitalisering@umu

Political party manifesto is one of the most significant ways of communication between a party and the citizens. In these documents, the parties present their values and ideological background as well as their priorities in current political issues. This master thesis deals with the topic of Civic Democratic Party and comparasion of its manifestos. Civic Democratic Party has been established in 1991. former Czechoslovakia. Until 2017 there has been created almost 30 different party manifestos. In this qualitative case study, the manifestos topics have been described, as well as its changes during these years. The analysis has been primarily focused on the topics of Economics and European integration. According to theoretical frame, we assume that the changes are made only in case of the significant changes of political environment. We also focus on the process of change, as the impact of party Conventions and Expertise. This analysis has been primarily based on the interviews made with current and past members of the party.

Our study aimed at contributing to the understanding of party policy preferences in Belgium, i.e. how far can we explain the attention that political parties allocate to different policy issues in their electoral manifestos. One of the added values of our study was located in our research design. We reversed the perspective that is used in most of previous works and we used party policy preferences – via the analysis of party manifestos – as a dependent rather than an independent variable. We were not interested in what could be explained by party preferences but in what could actually explain them. In addition, we observed that, in the few works that considered party policy preferences as a dependent variable, party competition was rarely mobilised as an explanatory variable. Our study aimed at contributing to the understanding of the content of party manifestos by confronting the hypothesis of party competition with other possible explanations.<p><p>With the help of new data about party preferences in Belgian party manifestos collected in the framework of the CAP project, we quantitatively analysed the content of all party manifestos between 1977 and 2007 and coded them according policy domains and issues (up to about 250 policy issues and coding categories). Based on the selection of four specific policy issues (environment, decentralisation, migration and morality issues) and on regression analyses (panel data), we hypothesised that party preferences on theses policy issues is best explained by party competition variables.<p><p>Our findings confirmed that party policy preferences are not static but rather that they evolve over time. Party preferences are different over time and space and we aimed at providing clues about what could explain these differences. Based on the literature, a large set of potential explanatory variables has been mobilised in order to explain these differences. But most of these independent variables have no or few impact on party preferences, such as the fractionalisation of the party system or ‘real-world’ indicators. Contrary to previous findings, changes in party manifestos are not explained by the fact that the party grows in size and gets older or by the fact that it wins or loses the elections. Similarly, we observed that party strategies – including party name change and the creation of electoral alliances – had no impact of the content of part manifestos. Even if our bivariate analyses indicated the importance of phenomena related to the government formation and participation, we found out that this effect disappears in multi-variate analyses.<p><p>Still, the introduction of our party competition variables – based on the niche party’s size, electoral fortunes and government participation – provided ambiguous results, depending on the policy issue at stake. Party competition contributes to the understanding of party policy preferences on environment and migration. Nonetheless, our models do not demonstrate an impact of party competition on preferences concerning decentralisation and morality. When controlling for party families, we observe that party competition has a significant impact on party preferences, meaning that political parties react to the electoral strength of a niche party by paying more attention to the niche party’s issue in their manifesto. Finally, the observed impact of party competition on policy preferences concerns certain parties only and the other parties display preferences that appear independent from the existing patterns of party competition. / Doctorat en Sciences politiques et sociales / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished