sion and their percentage of votes in the latest national elections68. It is important to underline not all the newly established parties are anti-EU integration. Looking at Table 3, we can see that there are twenty-one new political parties. Five of these parties are strongly anti-European integration and almost all of them have a vote share higher than five percent in the latest parliamentary elections, as we can see from the table. Five Star Movement in Italy with 25.9% of the votes and ANO2011 of Czech Republic with 18.7% of the votes deserve special attention. Before moving further, it is important to introduce a new discussion that definitely deserves further attention. Innumerable numbers of scholars have been commenting on the pro/anti European integration. Not only expert surveys but also manifesto projects locate political parties in this dimension. However, with the economic crisis there is certain change on the focus of this dimension. With the clear case of Greece, political parties have been competing over a new issue, being pro/anti bailout packages.
Mechanics The second way Europeanization might have affected the party systems in MSs is the mechanics of the party system, which is, basically, the interaction between the relevant political parties. For this section, we will be analyzing if political parties in national arena locate themselves in anti/ pro-European integration dimension and compete over it. This will provide us the opportunity to observe the possible existence of new clustering. If any new clustering can be observed, this 68. The positioning of the political parties in the pro/anti EU integration scale is done by personal judgement, which is open to discussion. However, there are no recent expert surveys that position the newly established parties. The analysis will be repeated with the new data in 2015.
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Elections in Europe in Times of Crisis
can be taken as an indication of the effect of Europeanization. Before moving to the analysis related to positioning of the political parties, it is quite beneficial to skim through the national parliamentary elections in Europe. Appendix Table 2 also shows national parliamentary elections in every MS since 2000. Every country had at least three national parliamentary elections in the meantime. These elections can be named as pre-crisis and post-crisis according to the year they have been held. We claim that this analysis will provide us the opportunity to observe the degree of inclusion of the EU as a dimension in the newly established parties. For this purpose, some recent data has been derived from the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES). The dataset provides expert data on positioning of 237 political parties on European integration in all EU Member States except Luxembourg, Cyprus and Malta. The survey also includes political parties in Norway, Switzerland and Turkey. For the purpose of this study, we have only taken the data of MSs. Table 4 replicates the Mair table about the mechanics of the party systems with new data. However, in this analysis there is a certain problem of time mismatch. The “newest” complete comparative expert survey that we can use is still the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey. However, for a better analysis of the effects of the economic crisis, latest national elections should be used. This means that our expert survey does not contain certain information on political parties that are recently established. For this reason, personal judgment is included in newly established parties, which are mentioned in Table 369. 69. �������������������������������������������������������� Using Chapel Hill expert survey criteria all the political parties in Table 3 have been coded. With the latest developments, some existing parties also changed their positions in the scale. However, they are left as they are in the expert survey.
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