Party Positions in the EP -- p16
national and EU positions. We expect this dynamic between national politics and EU politics
to form one of the more interesting topics in the study of party competition for future
research.
7. Discussion
A broad range of empirical and spatial analyses in political science depend on the
specification of the policy positions of political parties, covering topics as diverse as coalition
formation, political representation, macro-economic policy development and legislative
decision making. In this paper we have provided the first measure of such policy positions in
the European Parliament using expert surveys. Given the changing political and institutional
context of European party groups, we find the use of summaries of expert judgments—
systematic summaries of the collective wisdom of well-informed experts—to offer
compelling advantages over other methods, especially inductive or indirect measurements.
While broadly consistent with the findings from recent placements based on roll call analyses
(Hix et al. 2005), for instance, our approach has the benefit of providing precise and direct
numerical placements, on well-specified a priori dimensions of policy that do not need to be
subject to uncertain, inductive interpretation.
Our results indicate that on the two most salient dimensions (taxes versus spending and
EU federalism), there appear to be three broad sets of party blocs: the PES, Greens and GUE
on the redistributive left and pro-integrationist in character; the EPP and ELDR on the centre-
right of the redistributive spectrum but broadly pro-integrationist; and finally the UEN and
EDD in their own policy region on the economic right and distinctly Euro-sceptic on the EU
federalism dimension.
Another central finding of this study is that the first dimension of policy space in the
European Parliament strongly bundles with the traditional left-right axis of European party
systems, principally socio-economic in nature but also incorporating newer issues such as
immigration and the environment. In addition, we found strong evidence of a second axis of
policy competition, orthogonal to the first, consisting of support for EU integration.