Abstract Some argue that the direct representative relationship between voters and party elites is difficult to establish in transition democracies. In part, the difficulty stems from the fact that parties may have a hard time discerning the preferences of their respective voter coalitions. In the case of EU integration, parties may have additional incentives to disregard the interests of the public in the hope of securing benefits associated with their country's membership of the EU. In this article we investigate the extent of party responsiveness on EU integration issues in early transition years in central and eastern European countries. We find that while mainstream parties do consistently show more support for EU integration, we find no evidence that parties, in fact, track their voters. The lack of responsiveness cannot, however, be explained by the general instability of public and party positions, nor can this absence of a relationship be satisfactorily captured by low salience of the EU in the transition years.