Party Groups and Policy Positions in the European Parliament



Party Positions in the EP -- p6

This is because the behavioral benchmarks which might provide observable implications of
party group policy positions are not only incompletely understood, but also constantly
changing as the roles, powers, size, and composition of the European Parliament evolve. As
we argue later in this paper, for instance, there is a potentially complex dynamic which maps
policy preferences of constituent national parties into policy preferences of EP party groups,
and it cannot be assumed that the latter can always be represented by the mean of the former.
Manifesto texts and roll-call votes may suffer from similar problems. Indeed, when trying to
resolve which method of estimating party positions is best, we typically fall back on the
expertise and wisdom of political experts. By extension, then, we see systematic collection of
judgments of political experts on party locations as the best way to harvest systematically this
wisdom, which will take into account all relevant information about a party group’s position,
including voting behavior, political speeches, debates, expressed opinions of party leaders,
and so on. Even though experts will vary in their judgments, we can combine and summarize
these judgments as a substantive indication of a party’s likely set of policy locations. In short,
our best estimate of European party group positions on policy resides in the collective
wisdom of EU experts, available through systematically collected and summarized expert
judgments.

3. An Expert Survey of EP Party Group Policy Positions

Our survey of experts was conducted from April to June 2004, at the time of the historic
expansion eastward of the European Union to include 10 new member states and just before
the June 2004 elections to the newly expanded European Parliament. Our expert survey
solicited 36 experts on the European Union and the European Parliament drawn from
professional directories and citation indices. These experts were largely academic specialists
drawn from 32 different institutions in 12 different countries but also included a handful of
European Parliament researchers who have published on the topic. Our survey system used
individually sent, English-language e-mail solicitations containing a unique URL linking the
respondent’s solicitation e-mail to our on-line survey questionnaire website. The
questionnaire itself was an interactive, on-line system linked to a database server which



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