CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Manassarian, Isabella Sergey |
|---|---|
| Title | How European is Bulgaria? The Case of Party System and Politics |
| Summary | The aim of this thesis is to depict the level of Europeanization of the Bulgarian party politics. It was done by analyzing five different variables: 1. the nature of the electoral system itself, 2. voter turnouts in national parliamentary elections, 3. party-based Euroscepticism, 4. the nature of ethnic politics, and 5. the existence of ‘extreme trends’ in party politics. The situation in Bulgaria with regards to each of those is compared to that of Western Europe on the one hand and CEE on the other. The basic research question of this thesis is if the Bulgarian party system and politics does fall into the ‘Western’, i.e. Europeanized camp or not. The answer is provided on a ‘more-or-less’ continuum due to the complexity of the issue. An examination of each of the variables chosen has revealed that overall the case of Bulgaria is very unique. It is neither fully ‘Europeanized’, nor is it typically ‘Eastern’. Only in the case of the nature of the electoral systems, Bulgaria has displayed ‘Westernization’. With regards to the other four variables, one could notice that the various aspects of each of them show different trends in terms of their level of Europeanization, with some demonstrating typically ‘Western’, while others truly ‘Eastern’ perspectives, yet others proved to have the mixture of the features of the two. Keywords: Europeanization, Westernization, Bulgarian party politics, voter turnouts, electoral systems, party-based Euroscepticism, ethnic politics, right-wing extremism |
| Supervisor | Pelinka, Anton |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/manassarian_isabella.pdf |
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