Party Positions in the EP -- p8
asked to locate each party on a scale measuring the importance of the policy dimension to the
party in question. In a significant extension of the Laver and Hunt approach, we also asked
experts to locate all parties on a general left-right dimension. A full list of the question
wordings and dimensions is provided in Appendix A.
In addition to locating each politically significant party on each scale, the questionnaire
also asked respondents to indicate the relative importance of the issue to each party (also on a
1-20 point scale). This provides a position-independent measure of the salience of the issue
for a particular party group, and may be used along with party group seat share to construct a
measure of the overall political salience of a particular policy dimension.
4. Results: Policy positioning in the EP
Left-Right Positioning
A full statistical summary of the results of the expert locations of the party groups on each
policy dimension is presented in Table 2. The first row shows the mean score, followed by the
standard error (SE), the standard deviation, and the number of respondents for each party on
each dimension. The party groups are presented from left to right according to their mean
values on the general left-right dimension, and are ranked following the left-right dimension
by descending order of overall salience (see Table 3 below).
[Table 2 about here]
At the far left of the political spectrum is the European United Left/Nordic Green Left
(GUE), with a mean value of 3.6 (SE .51), followed by the Greens (Verts) at 5.1 (SE .36). The
three largest party groups, the Party of European Socialists (PES), the European Liberal and
Democrat Reform Party (ELDR), and the European People’s Party (EPP) occupied positions
on the left-of-centre, centre, and right-of-centre respectively. The PES scored 7.4 (SE .30), the
ELDR 11.8 (SE .43) and the EPP 12.6 (SE .39). On the farther right appear the Union for a
Europe of Nations (UEN), scoring 16.5 (.58), and the Group for a Europe of Democracies and
Diversities (EDD) at 17.1 (SE .49).
In Figure 1 we illustrate these positions graphically. Each point represents a party’s left-
right mean judgment, and with the bars representing the 95% confidence interval. The left-