This research delves into the abundant landscape of party positioning data, highlighting a scarcity of interconnected voter and party positioning sources. Leveraging Voting Advice Applications ...(VAAs), this study explores congruence from a comparative standpoint, capturing political preferences on the same scale and timeframe. Analysing data from two pan-European VAAs, EU Profiler and euandi, congruence is evaluated based on voter’s alignment with their preferred party across three issue dimensions. Findings underscore varying linkage strengths, particularly evident in a narrower representation on cultural and gender issues compared to economic ones. The study underscores the advantages of VAA data, urging a shift beyond the left-right continuum for a comprehensive understanding of party-voter congruence in a dynamic political landscape.
This special issue brings together seven original contributions on actors involved in trilogue negotiations whose role has largely been neglecled: the Commission, the Council, the Court, the ...Ombudsman, national parliaments, organised interests and Eurosceptic groups. This introduction outlines the setup and work processes of trilogues, and highlights the key findings of the issue's contributions, namely how actors at the edge of the negotiations can shape power relations in trilogues and how micro-behaviour shapes macro-processes of inter-institutional bargaining. It also discusses the ongoing tension between transparency and efficiency, notably when it comes to institutional oversight mechanisms and the legitimacy of trilogues.
What determines the re-election of incumbent members of the European Parliament (MEPs)? Using Heckman probit models with sample selection to predict re-election in 2014, this contribution considers ...the impact of policy leadership, formal leadership, professional dedication, and seniority, and investigates the conditional effect of ballot structures. It finds that formal leadership only has a positive effect for party leaders elected from open lists, while dedication and seniority do not impact incumbents' electoral performance. Instead, policy leadership is most clearly associated with incumbents' electoral fortunes, including an innovative new measure of MEPs' ability to influence the votes of others. The results also suggest that party leaders, when creating electoral lists that are not subject to change by voters, seek to ensure that policy leaders are reelected, but that voters, when given the opportunity to change the rankings of candidates on electoral lists, favor MEPs with greater electoral visibility instead.
We argue that the attention parties devote to a topic contributes to expanding the opportunity structure to acquire information that party supporters have. We evaluate this proposition in a ...comparative manner by focusing on an elite-driven new topic, namely the Spitzenkandidaten system in European Parliament elections. We link candidate recognition survey data from 28 countries with over 175 party electoral programs, press releases, and Twitter communication before the 2014 European Parliament elections. Our results show that especially what parties emphasize or decide to talk about on Twitter contributes to what their supporters will know. As proposed, this is an indirect effect through a general contribution to the information environment in election campaigns. However, party communication portfolios should not discount traditional tools given that these can also contribute to the opportunity structures available to party supporters.
Although it is well acknowledged that moral foundations have an emotional component, little is known about the relation between moral foundations and emotions in current political and public debates. ...The analysis of this relation is crucial to better understand causal pathways from affect and emotion to climate change action and behavior. Employing Emotion Discourse Analysis, this study analyzes appeals to moral foundations in European Parliament (EP) plenary debates on the topic of climate change, and their relation to emotions between 1994 and 2022. We show that the relation between moral foundations and emotions depends on the narratives put forward by policymakers from different political groups. After linking narratives, moral foundations and emotions, we hypothesize how the identified combinations affect political action. We show that narratives promoting action-oriented and effective appeals to emotions, which are key in advancing environmental protection, are not the most prominent in EP debates.
Although extensive research analyzes the factors that motivate European parties to shift their policy positions, there is little cross-national research that analyzes how voters respond to parties' ...policy shifts. We report pooled, time-series analyses of election survey data from several European polities, which suggest that voters do not systematically adjust their perceptions of parties' positions in response to shifts in parties' policy statements during election campaigns. We also find no evidence that voters adjust their Left-Right positions or their partisan loyalties in response to shifts in parties' campaign-based policy statements. By contrast, we find that voters do respond to their subjective perceptions of the parties' positions. Our findings have important implications for party policy strategies and for political representation.
This paper examines the various factors that make the European Parliament Administration so distinctive and also how it has responded to new challenges. The first part of this paper looks briefly at ...the EP's evolution. It then goes on to examine the main ways in which the European Parliament differs from national parliaments and the implications of these differences for the work of the EP Secretariat, some of them obvious and familiar and others less so. The second part of the paper looks, instead, at some of the specific features of the EP administration assessing how the Institution has responded to new challenges, including how the EP administration has attempted to respond to the Covid pandemic. There are then some conclusions, with some indications of areas requiring further research.
The uniqueness of the European Parliament, as well as the magnitude of impact its decisions wield over member states, are elements that capture researchers’ attention. However, several of this ...institution’s particularities have made broad analysis of the textual content it produces difficult. This research note presents Vitrine Démocratique, a new, publicly accessible, and centralized database structuring interventions made in the European Parliament starting in 2014, both in their original languages and translated to English. The process by which this high-velocity database was created is presented, as well as a descriptive overview of the contents of this data source, which is continuously updated on a daily basis.
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