Parti Politikası ve Avrupa Birliği Gündemi: Siyasi Rekabet, İdeoloji ve Kimlik Siyaseti

Political parties play significant roles in the European Union (EU) accession process of candidate countries. Party positions at both domestic and the EU levels have a direct impact on the dynamics, direction, and the content of the integration as well as the candidate country’s relations with the EU. Therefore, a systemic re-evaluation of the party positions on the EU agenda would contribute to Turkish literature. This article designed a theoretical and methodological framework for the analysis of party positions on the EU agenda for causal explanation underlying these positions. This framework which is developed by reviewing Europeanization literature, as the main parameters of party politics focuses on political competition, ideology and identity politics models. The framework developed eight alternative hypotheses to analyze and compare alternative party positions (pro-European, soft-Eurosceptic, and hard-Eurosceptic).