The Party Political Make-Up of EU Institutions, 1979 - 2003
Political parties are important actors in EU legislative politics and might determine the position of EU bodies in legislative decision-making. Measures of the positions of the legislative bodies in the EU on the left-right and pro-anti Europe dimensions are widely used in the literature. To facilitate further research and to ensure direct comparability of results, Christophe Crombez, Simon Hix and Andreas Warntjen compiled a data set on the party political make-up of the three legislative bodies in the EU for the time period from the first direct election of the European Parliament to Eastern Enlargement.
The data set combines several existing sources to provide information on the left-right and pro-anti Europe position of the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union from 1979 to 2003. In some instances, the time series is complete until 2007. The data set also includes data sheets with the partisan government composition and the associated positions on left-right and pro-anti Europe dimensions for all EU member states from 1979 to 2003 (in some instances: 2006). To derive a value for coalition governments the values of the parties in government were weighted by the number of cabinet seats. The values were aggregated for the six month periods comprising the time in office of the Council Presidencies. A comparison of positional data based on party manifestos and expert surveys for all three legislative bodies shows that they are correlated for the left-right dimension, but only weakly so (if at all) for the pro-anti Europe dimension.
More information:
Warntjen, A., Crombez, C. and S. Hix (2008) ‘The Party Political Make-Up of EU Institutions’, Journal of European Public Policy, Vol. 15, No. 8, pp. 1243-1253
| A. Warntjen, C. Crombez, and S. Hix. The Party Political Make-Up of EU Institutions, 1979-2003 |
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