IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/cup/intorg/v29y1975i02p447-468_00.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Electoral ambitions and European integration

Author

Listed:
  • Feld, Werner
  • Wildgen, John K.

Abstract

Based on interviews with 82 national legislators in all nine member states of the European Community, this article examines and analyzes the attitudes and anticipated behavior of the respondents with respect to political integration. In the analysis we pursued four paths: personal motivations, constituency concerns, views of the European Parliament, and a sketch of the history of efforts for direct elections. According to our findings, political integration offers these legislators neither personal-material, electoral-partisan, nor institutional-prestige rewards that are unambiguous. Nevertheless, the interviews also show considerable expression of support for an expanded level and scope of decision making by the Community institutions and for political union. This might be explained by the attractiveness of a United Europe as a forum in which small and medium powers are able to act as a great power. However, the nation state provides things even more basic to political classes: an identity, immediate access to available power, and opportunities for more power.

Suggested Citation

  • Feld, Werner & Wildgen, John K., 1975. "Electoral ambitions and European integration," International Organization, Cambridge University Press, vol. 29(2), pages 447-468, April.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:intorg:v:29:y:1975:i:02:p:447-468_00
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/S0020818300004975/type/journal_article
    File Function: link to article abstract page
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cup:intorg:v:29:y:1975:i:02:p:447-468_00. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kirk Stebbing (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.cambridge.org/ino .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.