Dr. Rafal Soborski presents paper at the annual conference of the American Political Science Association

22/09/2011

Dr Rafal Soborski presents paper at Annual Conference of the American Political Science Association

Dr Rafal Soborski attended the APSA 2011 Annual Meeting in Seattle, Washington (September 1-4) where he co-presented, with Prof. Chris Flood of the University of Surrey, their joint paper, ‘Ideology and the Rights of the Nation in Party Alignments on the EU: A Comparison of Conservative Parties in Britain, France and Poland’.

The central research question addressed by the paper is a comparative one. It asks why political parties which share similar topographical locations within their respective national party systems, and share membership of the same, or closely neighbouring, political families, often show significantly different alignments on EU integration, depending on policy sector and point in time. The paper examines four conservative parties, two of which – the British Conservative Party, the French Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) – are located within Western European national political environments, while the two others – the Polish Platforma Obywatelska (PO), and Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS) – operate within the same Central European post-communist state. The patterns of vari¬ation and similarity between the parties revealed at the meso-level of analysis used in the paper is a valuable complement to the necessarily reductive categorisations and generalisations drawn in macro-level comparative studies.

The paper, which received positive feedback at the Conference, is available online at: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1900055

Link to this page: http://www.richmond.ac.uk/n/1194.aspx