Bulgarian Political Parties and EU: Organizational Change and Intra-Party Relations

There is a wide range of academic literature, paying attention to the EU impact on politics and policies, of EU member and candidate states. Some authors define this process as a process of Europeanization.

In this paper I pay attention on the observed organizational changes in Bulgarian political parties which result from the EU impact, before and after the country accession to the union. 

It is expected that the political, financial and economic impact of the EU for the development of state politics and policies will be very strong, and will influence significantly underdeveloped Bulgarian political institutions. As a result EU experts at both the administrative and party level will have access to significant political resources, knowledge and expertise. In addition, EU integration creates new opportunities for MEPs and EU party experts giving them new political resources, “informational advantage” (Hix & Goetz, 2001: 13) and larger areas for political action. Thus the office-seeking party/ies need of expertise in EU politics and policies could stimulate EU experts to look for party-status expressed legitimation of their EU expertise and knowledge. It will be interesting to observe whether this type of “opportunity structure” will provoke intra-party competition between party EU experts and domestic experts.

I focus my research on both the explicitly expressed changes (analysis based on party status documents) and to changes in intra-party relations, which are not formally expressed (analysis based on interviews with party functionaries).