PARTY COMPETITION AND EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: A COMPARISON OF WESTEAST AND CANDIDATE COUNTRIES

How does the domestic structure of party competition affect parties’ political support for European integration? Is it possible to estimate a party’s position about European integration by looking at its political stance in domestic politics? Previous research has proved that the answer to the above questions is “yes”. This article aims to explore whether these findings travel to the candidate countries that are going to join the European family in a near future. Our findings show that this model is applicable to candidate countries. The results, on the other hand, suggest that the four candidate countries Serbia, Bosnia Herzegovina, and Macedonia introduce similar patterns with East European countries whereas Turkey is more similar to West Europe in terms of the structure of party competition.

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