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Euroscepticism has traditionally occurred among radical left and radical right parties. But opposition to European integration has recently also spread to the political mainstream, especially to centre-right parties. Yet, we know comparatively little about the nature of Eurosceptic claims made by these parties. Do they rely on the same repertoire as radical parties, or do they develop their own specific versions of Euroscepticism? A comparative content analysis of Eurosceptic claims in the 2014 and 2019 European election manifestos of centre-right and radical right parties in Austria, France, Germany and the Netherlands shows that centre-right parties do not draw to a significant extent on the existing discourse of radical right parties. Instead, they predominantly create their own Eurosceptic claims, which are tailor-made to their entrenched programmatic brands. These findings resonate well with the assumptions of saliency approaches to party competition.

This essay takes stock of the literature on how European Union policies are being put into practice by the member states. It first provides an overview of the historical evolution of the field. After a relatively late start in the mid-1980s, the field has meanwhile developed into one of the growth industries within EU research. The paper identifies four waves of EU implementation scholarship, each with its own theoretical, empirical and methodological focus. In the second part, the review discusses the most important theoretical, empirical and methodological lessons to be drawn from existing studies. Scholars should explore better data sources and invest more energy in collecting their own data on transposition timing and correctness. Research on application and enforcement, on the other hand, needs to go beyond case studies and instead search for or produce data with which the practical phase of implementation can be analyzed on a broader, more comparative scale. Adapted from the source document.

This article analyses the cleavages that structured the debates within the Convention on the Future of Europe. Taking the positions on the institutional rules governing EU social policy as an empirical example, it addresses the question of whether these positions were determined by party politics or by national interests. The article also examines how the delegates' different institutional backgrounds affected their positions. A statistical analysis of a new data set on the positions of conventionists towards EU social policy expansion shows that, overall, delegates' positions were determined by a mixture of party politics and national interests. At the same time, there are institutional effects separating representatives of government parties, who tended to stress national interests, from actors representing opposition parties, who acted more according to a party political logic.