Party Positions in the EP -- p7
recorded respondent answers. Following an initial solicitation round on April 26, we sent a
second round of request four weeks later to experts who had not yet responded. A total of 14
respondents completed questionnaires in the first round, and 10 more in the follow-up round,
for a total of 24 respondents and an overall response rate of 67 %.
As in the Laver and Hunt survey, EP specialists were asked to use their best judgment to
locate party groups on substantive policy dimensions. The party groups were the seven
political groups existing in the European Parliament at the time of the survey. These groups
and their abbreviations are listed in Table 1, along with their share of the total EP seats. For
some of the results we report below, we weight by seat share. While previous presentations of
expert survey results (e.g. Laver and Hunt 1992, Benoit and Laver forthcoming) have
weighted by vote share, the national-based, decentralized nature of EP elections makes
computing the vote share of EP party groups a complicated exercise and we have opted for
seat share instead, given that some variant of PR is used in all member states we do not
believe this method will significantly distort results.
[Table 1 about here]
Each policy dimension was titled in terms of its substantive content and anchored at each
end by two short phrases setting out substantive policy positions. The survey provided
respondents with a list of the European party groups (see Table 1, excluding “Other”) and
asked respondents to locate each groups on a 20-point scale for 8 different substantive policy
dimensions. Substantive policy dimensions covered in the survey included a set of four
“core” dimensions deployed in every country in the Laver and Benoit study (forthcoming).
These were: increase spending v. reduce taxes; “social” policy; environmental policy; and
decentralization. Also included, on the basis of advice from Parliament watchers, were policy
dimensions dealing with, among other matters: immigration; deregulation; privatization;
religion; treatment of former communists; media freedom; EU policy; security policy; health
care; and foreign ownership of land. For instance, the question on economic deregulation
presented a scale anchored by two opposing endpoints as: (1) Favours high levels of
regulation and control of the markets, such as telecommunications, versus (20) Favours
deregulation at every opportunity. For each dimension, Parliamentary specialists were also