Search results

Over the last decade, a number of non-mainstream European parties have cultivated friendly and mutually advantageous relations with the Russian political establishment. This phenomenon has been common to both the national conservative right and the radical left. This article critically discusses these parties' adaptation to the new political context triggered by Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and assesses their strategies and tactics to adapt to the new reality. The cases analysed include primarily Western European Russia-friendly political forces and the level of analysis focuses both on the domestic and supranational EU-level dynamics.

The euro crisis is increasingly affecting the political debate in the European Union. Exogenously determined power shifts and institutional changes have been imposed on a number of member states. These measures and the direct intervention of external stakeholders in the key realms of domestic politics pose a serious challenge to both the EU's cohesiveness and its democratic nature. This study looks at how the voting dynamics and the government/opposition-like alignments in the European Parliament are affected by the ongoing crisis. It highlights the balance of partisan and nationally driven factors behind legislators' choices related to the management of the crisis. To capture the impact of the crisis-related debate on the actors' cohesiveness and alignments, two sets of vote-based analyses are conducted. This analysis proves that the main determinant of legislators' alignments in crisis-related debates is membership of the eurozone, while the explanatory potential of factors such as ideology and partisanship appears residual. Adapted from the source document.

This paper systematically looks at the nature of MEPs' internet-based "web tools" in the past EP legislature and at the extent to which their features reflect the complex nature of the EP environment ("Europeanization of communication"). To conduct this operation, a variety of structural and graphic features of MEPs' websites have been identified, which have been made statistically analyzable, following a process of standardization and categorization, and were finally collected into a unique dataset. The preliminary figures obtained have been then controlled for a wide array of pluri-dimensional factors, operating both at micro-/individual-level and at macro-/country-level. Conceived as an explorative study towards clearer and more accurate understanding of MEPs' internet-based communication styles and political strategies, our analysis aims at providing a stepping stone for further investigation in this direction. Keywords: e-politics, electoral communication, European Parliament, interactivity, MEPs. (Romanian Journal of European Affairs / SWP)