The Duality Of European Parliament Party Groups

Political parties have always been considered as a special factor in the construction of the European political organization. Especially with the development of European political integration, parties play a more and more important role, with the establishment of European parliament and emergence of transnational political parties in the parliament, the status and role of parties in Europe are further strengthened. The development of European integration has witnessed a great change of EU parties' organizations, and a complex structure called transnational parties has appeared in the European parliament which is closely related to the reality of European political development. That is to say, the transnational parties in the European parliament are brought out according to nation-states internal characters in the EU political environment, with its unique characters during its development as well; on the other hand, the development characters of transnational parties will impose a huge impact on EU future political development. Whether European parliament party groups can achieve the expectation of EU designers will be verified during its development only.European parliament party group is an innovation of European parties' polity within the range of Europe in the process of European integration. That European parliament takes transnational parliament party groups rather than national delegation as the main action unit of national delegate institution breaks the convention. As a kind of transnational party group organization form, parliament party group is the link between EU and domestic politics and plays an important role on the development of EU politics and European integration. By analyzing the emergence of European parliament party groups, organizational structure and operational mechanism, this paper discusses the parliament party group dual characteristics and explains the reason, which may be helpful for the prediction of its development direction and the EU future political framework.By means of comparative analysis combining with specific individual examples, this paper studies the emergence and development of European parliament party groups and detailed development characters, especially further discusses the dual characters of European parliament party group development in terms of function contrast between nation-state party and European parliament party group. The first part analyzes the performance of European parliament party group dual characters: party group is mainly expressed in two aspects—supra-national and national, the former is expressed in the emergence of party groups and function performance, and the latter in party groups structure and internal decision-making. The second part analyzes the reasons of European parliament party groups dualism, which mainly consist three aspects: the framework of the EU political power, two-level politics and institutional factors of the European elections, and comes to a conclusion why parliament party groups put up dual characters of national and supra-national. The third part discusses the influences of the European parliament party groups on the EU politics: first of all, the influence of EP party groups on the characters of EU politics; secondly, it discusses the influence of the European parliament on the formation of party system within Europe. The party system in European level has not been formed through comparison between the function of parliament party groups and national party.