National Parties as Multilevel Organizations in the EU. A Comparative Case Study of Flanders, Denmark and the Netherlands

Abstract

This article scrutinizes national political parties' organizational linkages with the European level. Such linkages not only provide parties with information from the European level, but also provide the EU with a source of democratic legitimacy. By applying an inductive research design and qualitatively reconstructing the organizational linkages of 15 parties in Flanders, the Netherlands and Denmark, this article shows that not only national parties' concrete organizational practices, but also their underlying strategies for engaging the European level differ notably. Importantly, parties' multilevel organizational strategies differentiate between an ‘internal’ dimension (linkages with their ‘own’ EU-level agents) and an ‘external’ dimension (linkages with their Europarty). Building on these case studies, the article presents an original typology of multilevel party organization in an EU context, providing researchers with an empirically grounded and ideal-typical benchmark for understanding the organization and behaviour of national parties in the EU.