Over the past half-century, Europe has experienced the most radical reallocation of authority that has ever taken place in peace-time, yet the ideological conflicts that will emerge from this are ...only now becoming apparent. The editors of this 2004 volume, Gary Marks and Marco Steenbergen, have brought together a formidable group of scholars of European and comparative politics to investigate patterns of conflict that are arising in the European Union. Using diverse sources of data, and examining a range of actors, including citizens, political parties, members of the European Parliament, social movements, and interest groups, the authors of this volume conclude that political contestation concerning European integration is indeed rooted in the basic conflicts that have shaped political life in Western Europe for many years. This comprehensive volume provides an analysis of political conflict in the European Union.
Evaluating expert judgments STEENBERGEN, MARCO R.; MARKS, GARY
European journal of political research,
20/May , Letnik:
46, Številka:
3
Journal Article
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. Although expert surveys have gained a prominent place in comparative studies of party positions on issues, their validity has been called into question. In this article, some of the validity ...concerns are evaluated in the context of the authors' own expert survey on national party positions vis‐à‐vis European integration. One goal of the article is to demonstrate that this expert survey produces valid measures of party positions. An equally important goal, however, is to suggest some methods that can help in assessing the quality of expert survey data. These methods, which are rooted in psychometric theory, are applicable in a variety of contexts and are easily implemented.
Right-wing populist parties in European democracies appeal to citizens’ feelings of uncertainty related to globalization by promoting tough immigration laws and curbing the power of the European ...Union. This article adds to our understanding of how individuals’ risk propensity relates to support for right-wing populist parties and their ideas in the context of globalization. In particular, by drawing on survey data from the United Kingdom we investigate how this personality trait relates to support for the United Kingdom Independence Party and the vote for a British exit from the European Union. The article explores the complex interplay between risk propensity and right-wing populist appeals by dissecting the direct, indirect and total effects of this trait.
Modeling Multilevel Data Structures Steenbergen, Marco R.; Jones, Bradford S.
American journal of political science,
01/2002, Letnik:
46, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Multilevel data are structures that consist of multiple units of analysis, one nested within the other. Such data are becoming quite common in political science and provide numerous opportunities for ...theory testing and development. Unfortunately, this type of data typically generates a number of statistical problems, of which clustering is particularly important. To exploit the opportunities offered by multilevel data, and to solve the statistical problems inherent in them, special statistical techniques are required. In this article, we focus on a technique that has become popular in educational statistics and sociology-multilevel analysis. In multilevel analysis, researchers build models that capture the layered structure of multilevel data, and determine how layers interact and impact a dependent variable of interest. Our objective in this article is to introduce the logic and statistical theory behind multilevel models, to illustrate how such models can be applied fruitfully in political science, and to call attention to some of the pitfalls in multilevel analysis.
Consideration set models (CSMs) offer a novel way to study electoral behavior. Until now, they have been mostly studied at the micro-level of the voter's decision process. By contrast, we focus on ...the implications of CSMs for understanding the phenomenon of party competition. We propose a two hurdle model whereby parties compete for both consideration and selection, pursuant the consideration and choice stages of the CSM. We operationalize these hurdles in terms of a party's inclusivity—is it being considered?—and exclusivity—is it considered on its own?—and formally derive lower- and upper-bounds for the electoral fortunes of the party. We also show how consideration set data can be used to sketch the competition landscape in an election and to characterize the system-wide competitiveness of a political system. We illustrate our concepts and ideas using data from the 2010 Dutch and 2014 Swedish parliamentary elections.
Who’s Cueing Whom? Steenbergen, Marco R.; Edwards, Erica E.; de Vries, Catherine E.
European Union politics,
03/2007, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
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The 2005 French and Dutch referendum campaigns were characterized by an alleged
disconnect between pro-European political elites and Eurosceptic masses. Past
evidence regarding elite-mass linkages in ...the context of European integration has
been conflicting. Whereas some scholars argue that political elites respond to the
changing preferences of their electorates, others suggest that party elites cue the
mass public through a process of information and persuasion. We contend that these
conflicting results stem from the reciprocal nature of elite-mass linkages and
estimate a series of dynamic simultaneous equations models to account for this
reverse causation. Using Euro-barometer and expert survey data from 1984-2002, we
find evidence of a dual-process model, whereby party elites both respond to and
shape the views of their supporters. We also find that the strength of these results
is contingent on several factors, including the type of electoral system,
intra-party dissent and voter characteristics.
Our purpose in this article is to cross-validate expert and manifesto measures of party positioning on European integration. We compare these data with each other and with measures from a European ...election survey and an elite survey of parliamentarians. We find that expert surveys provide the most accurate data for party positioning on European integration. In part, the errors of expert evaluations and electoral manifestos are shared. Both have some difficulty measuring the positioning of small, extreme, parties. But we also detect and explain errors that are unique to each measurement instrument.
We explore the impact of prosocial orientations on a domain of American public opinion that has puzzled many-attitudes toward social welfare policies. We focus on the orientation of humanitarianism, ...i.e., a sense of obligation to help those in need, and find that this value can explain support for a wide variety of social welfare policies. We argue that humanitarianism is an important element of the American sociopolitical ethos, although it has received little attention in the public opinion literature. We contrast humanitarianism with egalitarianism and show that these dispositions lead people to support distinctive sets of policies that constitute different types of welfare state. While egalitarianism causes people to embrace policies that mandate an extensive economic role for the government, humanitarianism is associated with more modest policies that seek to address the problems of the needy. Support for these more modest policies has generally been much greater in the United States than support for more invasive policies that seek to tinker with the free market. Thus, we argue that humanitarianism provides a better explanation for public opinion toward welfare in the United States than egalitarianism. We discuss the implications of these findings for public opinion research.
Political scientists often describe party competition, political behavior or public preferences in left/right terms. Nevertheless, the usefulness of the concepts “left” or “right” is rarely explored. ...This study assesses whether the left/right continuum resonates with publics in developing Latin American democracies. Using data from the 2008 wave of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), the authors measure variability in left/right self-placement in three Latin American countries, namely, Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile. Building on the approach developed by Alvarez and Brehm for public opinion in the United States, the authors explore (a) the extent to which voters in Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile possess predicable left/right positions and (b) whether predictability can be attributed to individual- and country-level characteristics. At the individual level, the authors show that variability decreases with political sophistication. At the country level, they find that a lower degree of programmatic party system structuration leads to higher levels of response variation. Mapping the variability in left/right preferences provides important insights into the structure of public opinion and contours of political behavior in Latin America and how they differ from those of other regions such as North America. In addition, this study brings to bear important new individual-level insights into recent political developments in the Latin American region, especially the so-called left turn in Latin American politics.
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