Party Positions in the EP -- p14
6. EP policy platforms and national member parties
One emerging area which students of politics in the European Union have only recently
begun to explore relates to differences in policy competition at the national and EU levels.
For instance, how much does agreement between policy positions explain which national
parties join which EP party groupings? Do parties in national elections adopt policy positions
as a result of policy influences from their EP party group? Or conversely, do EP party group
policy positions directly reflect the policy platforms of their national constituent parties? It is
quite possible that the nature and direction of these influences will differ according to policy
arena. We view research into this area of the Europeanization of policy among EU political
parties as one of the most promising areas for emerging research into the two overlapping
arenas of European party competition.
Our preliminary investigation of this issue compares the estimated policy positions of EP
party groups to the distribution of the policy positions of their constituent (member state)
national-level political parties. Data on these national-level positions come from the left-right
positions from the expert surveys reported in Benoit and Laver (forthcoming). Figure 3
portrays, for each EP party group, the kernel density estimate of member state party positions,
as well as the mean and confidence interval of the EP party group position on each issue. The
graphs also indicate how many national member parties were included in each analysis (a full
listing is provided in Appendix B).2
[Figure 3 about here]
The first obvious result is the clear correspondence between the mean EP group position
on left-right and the central tendency of the national party left-right positions. By and large,
the EP party groups’ left-right positions neatly reflect the central tendencies of their
constituent parties. In addition, as seen from the shape of their kernel densities, the member
parties of these EP groups clearly have similar national party positions on the left-right
dimension, even though some groups include a small number of parties that are out of step
with the central group position. It should be recalled that the EP and national country results
2 The EDD was excluded from the analysis as we had only 3 expert surveys at the national level for their
constituent parties.