Party Positions in the EP -- p11
positions on EU integration, the two most salient policy dimensions of taxes v. spending and
EU federalism. Figure 2 portrays the main party groups in this two-dimension policy space,
with each point representing the position mean on the two dimensions. The dashed lines
indicate the nearest regions to each party, showing the midpoint lines between each set of
adjacent points. This nearest-neighbourhood division of the space is known as a Voronoi
tessellation and has been used to represent party policy in Laver and Hunt (1992). Finally, the
circles around each party group point are drawn proportional to the seat share of each group.
[Figure 2 about here]
Figure 2 confirms what we observed earlier, that the are two broad camps of economic
parties, with GUE, Greens, and PES on the left, the ELDR and EPP right of centre, and the
UEN and EDD farther to the right. On EU integration, we see a grouping of the PES, ELDR,
EPP, and Greens on the pro-integration side, the GUE in the centre, and the UEN and the
EDD on the Euro-sceptic side. In two dimensions, there appear to be three broad sets of
parties: the PES, Greens and GUE on the left and pro-integration, the EPP and ELDR on the
centre-right, pro-integration region, and the UEN and EDD in their own policy region of
economic right and Euro-scepticism.
5. The EP Issue Space
Relative Issue Salience
Expert respondents were also asked to indicate the relative importance of each policy
dimension to each party group. Table 3 presents this information in the same format as Table
2. In terms of overall importance, the economic (Taxes-Spending and Deregulation) and EU
issues (Federalism, Authority, and Collective Security) were the most overall important, as
indicated by their average across all parties, weighted by party seat share (scoring between
14.1 and 14.9). Immigration also ranked highly at 13.9. The Environment and Social
Liberalism were ranked as the least important, at 12.7 and 12.5 respectively. Interestingly,
these two dimensions were also the two that turned out to be (from Table 2) the most divisive
(social) and the least divisive (environment).