C.1.1 Dependent Variable: IDEAL Points
Modeling outcomes in the EP has been a highly contested area of analysis since the first appearance of NOMINATE scores. Several empirical studies have explored this relationship between the voting behavior of individual MEPs within and among the EPGs and their national parties(Hix and Lord 1997; Hix 1999; Hix, Noury and Roland 2007). However, measuring party discipline, influence, or party effect on voting is incredibly difficult. In fact, extracting the effect of party organization and power from individual behavior in voting is nearly impossible (Hix 2002). Empirical evidence has provided only controversial conclu-sions about the direct measure of party influence (Krehbiel 1993; Snyder and Groseclose 2000; Ansolabehere, Snyder and Stewart 2001; McCarty, Poole and Rosenthal 2001; Sny-der and Groseclose 2001). Several criticisms have been made against the empirical testing of party influence because of the difficulty of detangling the role of parties from ideology (Snyder and Groseclose 2000) and identifying instances of strategic party voting remains tricky Denzau, Riker and Shepsle (1985). The main problem constraining the measurement of party influence is the inability to accurately separate legislators’ ideological preferences from party voting. Instead of attempting to derive and explore the mechanisms that induce party voting in individuals, this paper instead seeks account only for the distance between
an MEP and the calculated position of their national party taken from exogenous accounts of party preference.
The first step in the creation of the dependent variable is estimating several sets of distinctive ideal points from the available roll call data. This data provides the vote choices for each MEP (or their absence) on the set of roll-call votes between the beginning of the EP term in July 2009 and March 2013. It identifies every individual by a unique MEP identification number, and tracks membership in the EPGs (Hix, Noury and Roland 2006;
Hix and Marsh 2007). This data set provides 802 MEPs and sets of votes from each of the EPâĂŹs main committee; however, the data used includes a set of all legislative votes and all non-legislative votes, as well as all votes where the main policy areas are economic and monetary policy (economic), the foreign affairs and security policy (foreign), and the employment and social policy (employment ). Ideal points were calculated for all committee areas however, not all areas experience a substantial amount of legislation that is necessary to construct reliable ideal points nor are they easily matched to manifesto data to connect the individual and party preferences. Total number of votes for each area is listed in Table 41.
The ideal points are calculated for each MEP using the IDEAL Bayesian estimation process (Clinton, Jackman and Rivers 2004). The MCMC simulation process first identifies prior values for the parameters Μ and Κ for all roll call votes for all MEPs using Bayesian estimation and then repeats the process per its specification (Clinton, Jackman and Rivers 2004; Han 2007). The simulations then produce mean values of x along with their stan-dards errors. These measures were estimated in one dimensions only with all contested (not unanimous) votes and MEPs voting less than 25 times removed and each simulation was run 10,000 times.
Table 41: Votes in the 7th EP Session by Committee
Committee # of Votes
Agriculture and Rural Development 352
Budgets 488
Budgetary Control 295
Civil Liberties, Justice and Home affairs 254
Constitutional Affairs 80
Culture and Education 34
Development 64
Economic and Monetary Affairs 367
Employment and Social Affairs 167
Environment, Public Health, and Food Safety 391
Fisheries 148
Foreign Affairs 449
Women's Right and Gender Equality 143 Industry, Research, and Energy 177 Internal Market and Consumer Protection 56
International Trade 234
Legal Affairs 45
Petitions 12
Regional Development 70
Transport and Tourism 70
# of Votes % of Total Economic and Monetary Affairs Legislative 186 51.38
Non-legislative 176 48.62 Employment and Social Affairs Legislative 39 23.35 Non-legislative 128 76.65
Foreign Affairs Legislative 16 3.56
Non-legislative 433 96.44
All votes Legislative 989 24.82
C.1.2 Dependent Variable: Party Preference
As stated in the text, in order to construct the measures of preferences, the manifesto scores for several variables have been aggregated to produce preference scales for all parties.
The creators of the manifesto project have categorized manifesto text into many different areas on the levels of local, regional, national, and global and have also indicated whether the particular coded statements are representative of leftist views or rightists views. I use these indicators of left and right to construct a left/right scale for preferences in external relations (foreign Policy), economic policy, and employment policy along with a general measure of left/right placement. The following example will illustrate how these measures were constructed.
The manifesto data uses a coding scheme that identifies rightist and leftist statements of a party. For example, when coding statements about the military that appear in a party’s manifesto, positive statements are identified as rightist votes while negative statements are leftist votes. Similarly, negative statements on economic protectionism are considered rightist and positive statements are considered leftist. To create the right left index, the sum of rightist codes is subtracted from the sum of leftist codes, leaving a range of possible outcomes that rank parties from left to right. The data ranges from about -25 to 21 with Germany’s Die Linke as the party at the farthest point left, Greece’s Nea Demokratia at the furthest right, and the British Labour party at the median. This same process was used to construct the individual measures of foreign policy rankings, economic policy rankings, and employment policy ranking. The summary statistics are as follows:
Table 42: Policy Measures for Parties
Variable Mean Std. Dev. Min Max
Right-Left Aggregate -4.46 9.311 -24.63 20.18 Economic Policy 2.80 2.71 -4.05 11.33 Foreign Policy -4.38 3.71 -12.54 7.84 Employment Policy -1.98 2.68 -15.97 0.00