Party Positions in the EP -- p3
groups in the EP is not unrelated to the concomitant increase in powers of the Parliament
itself. Once a purely consultative institution, the EP is now a co-legislator with the European
Council for the roughly 70 percent of legislation that is currently adopted within the co-
decision framework. We view it as also increasingly important to understand better the
political space and policy positions through which these party groups compete.
In this paper we provide the first published estimates of the policy positions of the EP
political groups using expert surveys, measured just before the European elections of June
2004. Previous attempts to infer these positions have used a variety of indirect methods such
as codings of European election manifestos (Gabel and Hix 2004), interviews with European
elites (Arregui et al 2004), surveys of MEPs (Thomassen et al 2004) and analyses of roll call
votes (Hix et al 2005). Our approach, by contrast, locates the party groups directly using pre-
defined dimensions of policy by asking experts to place them on these dimensions. Using the
estimates, we also characterize the policy space of EP party competition. Finally, we explore
interesting patterns between EP party group positioning and the policy positions of each
group’s national party members.
In what follows, we discuss different approaches to measuring European policy
positions, highlighting the benefits of expert survey methodology in the EP context. Next we
describe our expert survey and then present and discuss the results. Following that, we use
factor analysis to measure the dimensionality and components of the EP policy space,
comparing our results to previous findings. Finally, we offer preliminary observations on the
interaction of the EP groups and their national affiliates in terms of policy convergence,
suggesting promising avenues for emerging research.
2. Measurement Approaches to European Policy Positions
Previous research has approached the problem of measuring the policy positions of the
European party groups in several distinct ways. These approaches can be distinguished along
two main dimensions, one associated with a substantive empirical focus and the other
methodological.