Party policy and group affiliation in the European parliament

British Journal of Political Science

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2010, Pages 377-398

  Mcelroy, Gail ^a   Benoit, Kenneth ^a  

^a TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN   (Ireland)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77953612438     PISSN: 00071234     EISSN: 14692112     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0007123409990469     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Amie Kreppel and George Tsebelis, 'Coalition Formation in the European Parliament', Comparative Political Studies, 32 (1999), 933-66;
2. Simon Hix, Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, 'Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament, 1979-2001', British Journal of Political Science, 35 (2005), 209-234
3. Michael Marsh, 'Testing the Second Order Election Model', British Journal of Political Science, 28 (1998), 591-607;
4. Karlheinz Reif and Hermann Schmitt, 'Nine Second Order National Elections: A Conceptual Framework for the Analysis of European Election Results', European Journal of Political Research, 8 (1980), 3-44.
5. Fritz Scharpf, Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
6. For a full listing of which national parties were affiliated with which EP groups in June 2004, see Gail McElroy and Kenneth Benoit, 'Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament', Party Politics, 13 (2007), 5-28.
7. Simon Hix, Abdul Noury and Gérard Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
8. Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament;
9. Tapio Raunio, The European Perspective: Transnational Party Groups in the 1989-1994 European Parliament (Aldershot, Surrey: Ashgate, 1997).
10. McElroy and Benoit, 'Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament'.
11. Also see Matthew Gabel and Simon Hix, 'Defining the EU Political Space: An Empirical Study of the European Election Manifestos', in Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, eds, European Integration and Political Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 93-119;
12. Hix Noury and Roland 'Power to the Parties: Cohesion and Competition in the European Parliament 1979-2001';
13. Jacques Thomassen, Abdul Noury and Erik Voeten, 'Political Competition in the European Parliament: Evidence from Roll Call and Survey Analyses', in Marks and Steenbergen, eds, European Integration and Political Conflict, pp. 141-164
14. On punishment mechanisms, see, for instance, Simon Hix, 'Electoral Institutions and Legislative Behavior: Explaining Voting Defection in the European Parliament', World Politics, 56 (2004), 194-223;
15. Gail McElroy, 'Committees and Party Cohesion in the European Parliament', Osterreichische Zeitschrift fuer Politikwissenschaft, 37 (2008), pp. 357-374
16. Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, p. 170.
17. Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament. Almost 3 per cent of the time MEPs vote against both their party group and national party.
18. Ian Budge and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, 'Finally! Comparative Over-Time Mapping of Party Policy Movement', in Ian Budge, Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Andrea Volkens, Judith Bara and Eric Tanenbaum, eds, Mapping Policy Preferences: Estimates for Parties, Electors, and Governments 1945-1998 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 19-50.
19. Duncan Black, 'The Theory of Committees and Elections' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958).
20. For a discussion of membership maintenance in groups, see Paul E. Johnson, 'Unravelling in Democratically Governed Groups', Rationality and Society, 2 (1990), 4-34.
21. Johnson, 'Unravelling in Democratically Governed Groups'.
22. Derek Hearl, 'Towards a Theory of Party Alignment: A Research Note', European Journal of Political Research, 9 (1981), 309-317
23. Financial Times, 'Cameron finds Czech mates for Europe bloc', 3 June 2006, p. 6.
24. Gail McElroy and Kenneth Benoit, 'Party Group Switching in the European Parliament', in William Heller and Carol Mershon, Political Parties and Legislative Party Switching (Basingstoke, Berks.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), pp. 147-172
25. National parties almost always join EP party groups as a bloc, although some exceptions exist; for instance, French MEPs from Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP) divided between the EPP and UEN in the 1999-2004 Parliament. We return to this case below.
26. Hix, Noury and Roland, Democratic Politics in the European Parliament, p. 497.
27. Hans-Dieter Klingemann, Richard L. Hofferbert and Ian Budge, Parties, Policies, and Democracy, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), p. 24.
28. See also Simon Hix and Michael Marsh, 'Punishment or Protest? Understanding European Parliament Elections', Journal of Politics, 69 (2007), 495-510.
29. SeymourM. Lipset and Stein Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross National Perspectives (New York: The Free Press, 1967).
30. McElroy and Benoit, 'Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament';
31. Kenneth Benoit and Michael Laver, Party Policy in Modern Democracies (London: Routledge, 2006).
32. McElroy and Benoit, 'Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament'.
33. McElroy and Benoit, 'Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament', p. 17.
34. Simon Hix and Christopher Lord, Political Parties in the European Union (Basingstoke, Hants.: Macmillan, 1997);
35. Gabel and Hix, 'Defining the EU Political Space'.
36. The EDD was excluded from the analysis as expert survey data existed at the national level for only three national parties.
37. William Green, Econometric Analysis (London: Prentice Hall, 2000), p. 858.
38. Daniel McFadden, 'Conditional Logit Analysis of Qualitative Choice Behaviour', in Paul Zarembka, ed., Frontiers in Econometrics (New York: Academic Press, 1974), pp. 105-142
39. Financial Times, 'Tories seek allies from wilder EU fringe', 1 February 2006, p. 9.
40. The model in Column 2 was estimated using WinBUGS 1.41. For direct comparison to the maximum likelihood results from Column 1, a second Bayesian model was also fitted using Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn's MCMCpack package for R, which yielded nearly equivalent results. Full details including the prior distributions and the likelihood function for the model in Table 4 are provided in the Appendix.
41. See, for example, Gary King, Michael Tomz and Jason Wittenberg, 'Making the Most of Statistical Analyses: Improving Interpretation and Presentation', American Journal of Political Science, 44 (2001), 347-361
42. This is based on 95 per cent posterior confidence intervals. The full listing of posterior probabilities for every party in both the predicted and actual party groups, as well as a posterior ratio with confidence intervals, is available from the authors.