European Integration and Political Conflict

Extract

European Integration and Political Conflict. Edited by Gary Marks and Marco R. Steenbergen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. 294p. $75.00 cloth, $26.99 paper.

In the study of European Union politics, it is commonplace to deplore the absence of electoral mobilization across national boundaries. One of the reasons the EU suffers from a democratic deficit, the argument goes, is that elections to the European Parliament serve as a projection screen for fundamentally domestic debates. The purpose of Gary Marks's and Marco Steenbergen's volume is to subject this common assumption to systematic empirical scrutiny. The central question the editors pose concerns what features shape the contestation over European integration. Specifically, can such contestation be captured by a small number of dimensions? And how do these dimensions relate to the domestic left/right cleavage over the role of the state in the economy?