View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Open Repository and Bibliography - Luxembourg Sixth Pan-European Conference on EU Politics 13 to 15 September 2012 University of Tampere, Finland Organized by the ECPR Standing Group on the European Union Anne-Sylvie Pigeonnier Ph. D. candidate at the University of Luxembourg University of Luxembourg European Governance Research Programme Campus Walferdange Route de Diekirch L-7220 Luxembourg e-mail:
[email protected] The Europeanisation of the Lithuanian party system: an uneven and limited process Abstract: The paper deals with the Europeanisation of the Lithuanian political parties from 1995 until today. The research question is to evaluate whether the European Union (EU) had an impact on the party system in Lithuania: How did the Lithuanian parties develop contacts with their European counterparts? Do they have one or several visions of the “Return to Europe”? How do they use the EU dimension in the internal arena? Are some parties more “Eurosceptic”? Presenting a framework for the analysis on Europeanisation and party systems, Ladrech (2002) identified five areas: (1) policy/programmatic content, (2) organisation, (3) patterns of party competition, (4) party- government relations, and (5) relations beyond the national party system. This paper focuses on the topics 1 and 5. First, it is explained, how the Lithuanian party system has integrated into the pan- European political parties’ networks. The “traditional” Lithuanian parties, established in the 1990s, have developed deep and stable contacts with their European counterparts. The “new” parties, founded in the beginning of the 2000s, have waited until Lithuania’s EU accession to take position in the European arena.