This thesis investigates the impact of the European Union (EU) on the way political parties emphasise and frame environmental issues in their election manifestos. In particular, I formulate a set of testable hypotheses regarding the impact of the EU on parties' policy positions on environmental issues and draw on competing theoretical arguments to derive alternative hypotheses which are contrasted to Europeanisation. The thesis reduces the methodological divide in comparative politics by adopting a 'mixed methods' research design that combines quantitative and qualitative methods. In the quantitative part, I test the hypotheses statistically by using the data of the Comparative Manifestos Project (CMP) for 54 parties in 19 West European party systems. In the qualitative part, I focus on causal mechanisms and compare three parties in Belgium , Britain and Greece by using empirical evidence drawn from extensive archival research conducted in the aforementioned countries. The primary empirical conclusion of the thesis is that the impact of the EU is certainly observable but rather minimal when compared to the impact of variables at the national or party level. Furthermore, on a methodological note, the thesis illustrates the usefulness of political text in estimating parties' policy positions especially when the content analysis of the CMP is supplemented with a qualitative discourse analysis.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:528356 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Gemenis, Kostas |
| Publisher | Keele University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
Page generated in 0.0049 seconds