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Party Policy and Group Affiliation in the European Parliament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 March 2010

Abstract

Systematic empirical research has yet to explain how national parties join political groups in the European Parliament. This article first demonstrates, using original empirical measures from expert surveys of party positions, that EP party groups consist of national parties sharing similar policy positions. Secondly, using Bayesian/MCMC methods, the paper estimates the policy determinants of group affiliation using a (conditional) multinomial logit model to explain that ‘party group’ choice is largely driven by policy congruence. Finally, predictions from the model identify national parties not in their ‘ideally congruent’ EP groups. The findings suggest that the organization of and switching between EP groups is driven mainly by a concern to minimize policy incongruence between national and transnational levels.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010

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References

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28 The model in Column 2 was estimated using WinBUGS 1.41. For direct comparison to the maximum likelihood results from Column 1, a second Bayesian model was also fitted using Andrew Martin and Kevin Quinn’s MCMCpack package for R, which yielded nearly equivalent results. Full details including the prior distributions and the likelihood function for the model in Table 4 are provided in the Appendix.

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30 This is based on 95 per cent posterior confidence intervals. The full listing of posterior probabilities for every party in both the predicted and actual party groups, as well as a posterior ratio with confidence intervals, is available from the authors.