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and Central Europe are markedly different from that of the current member states. Party systems
in particular are more fluid and parties themselves play a substantially reduced role in most
cases. Thus, the impact of party system fluidity and large scale political reform in Italy on Italian
MEPs may be understood in the broader context of EU enlargement as a possible example of
potential future patterns among MEPs from the new accession countries.
In this paper I first examine the question of why we might expect national political events
to impact the supranational level. In other words, this section outlines why we might expect
“Europeanization” to “move in the other direction” focusing, in particular, on the realm of
political party competition and the potential impact on the European Parliament. In the second
section I summarize (very briefly) the political upheaval experienced in Italy during from the late
1980s through the mid 1990s. This will include a more detailed look at the dramatic changes to
the party system as a result of a combination of international events, changing electoral laws and
the corruption scandals of the time. The third section outlines in detail the specific questions
addressed by the data analysis, the data itself and the process of analysis while section four
reports the results and interprets their meaning. In the final concluding section focuses on the
extent to which the lessons of this specific research can be broadly applied or generalized and
what this might mean in terms of EU enlargement.
Moving in the Other Direction?
The increasing focus in recent years on the impact of European integration on the
politics, policies and institutions of the member states of the European Union is understandable
given the rapid increase in the overall pace of integration since the late 1980s. Literature on
Europeanization has emphasized, among other things, the impact of EU integration on specific
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Convention