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Bulgarian Political Parties and European Integration: From Anticommunism to Euroscepticism
April 29, 2019 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Location
3312 Turlington
Brief Intro
Petia Kostadinova, University of Illinois at Chicago
CES Lunchtime Symposium
In this article, coauthored by Kostadinova and Dragomir Stoyanova, we review the political developments in Bulgaria since the fall of communism in 1989, including the process of European integration that it underwent. We pay a particular attention to the positions that political parties in the country take with respect to the country’s membership in the European Union (EU). The place of the EU in the profiles of Bulgarian political parties is assessed through quantitative data available from the Manifesto Project and expert assessments from the Chapel Hill expert database. The qualitative discussion of the extent of European Union support within each of the major players in Bulgaria’s party system adds to the quantitative data and provides the details on the specifies of Bulgarian socio-economic and socio-cultural Euroscepticism. We conclude that although Bulgarian political elite continues to have a pro-European orientation, Bulgarian Euroscepticism is already part of the party competition, and it is here to stay. lunch provided
