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This paper argues that although, if one seeks them out, one can find limited evidence of EU influences, in overall terms EU accession has had little significant direct
impact on Polish party politics. We also find that there is no obvious linear relationship between party positions on European integration and the extent to which the EU had impacted upon a party and the nature of those impacts, although it appears to have been greatest in those parties that were members of the large European party federations and EP groupings. In terms of general comparative
conclusions, our analysis highlights three main analytical and conceptual problems of examining EU impacts on domestic politics: how can they be properly conceived and
measured; what expectations do we have of change and what benchmarks are we measuring these impacts against; and how do we trace change back to an EU source, given that many of the adjustments were subtle and ‘indirect’? Our findings also suggest that, in many ways, ‘Europe’ appears to have been assimilated successfully into the logic of Polish domestic party politics. We conclude by suggesting that
analysts should we should start from the assumption that all developments in party and electoral politics can be explained through ‘domestic’ factors and, only when we
have exhausted these, should we look for ‘European’ explanations.
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