Party Policy and Group Affiliation in the European Parliament
By Gail Mcelroy, Kenneth Benoit. British Journal of Political Science, 2010
131 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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.
Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1afe3ecf2c55bd08175b6ec30d786a71a03d7443
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In Political Science and International Relations
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Clarity of responsibility: How government cohesion conditions performance voting (2013, background): “Research has shown that these party groups consist of national parties sharing similar policy positions (McElroy & Benoit 2010).”
- Empowerment of the European Parliament (2013, background): “However, the left-right positions extracted from roll-call votes are more strongly clustered around the political groups than the commonality of the ideological positions of the national parties composing the groups would indicate (Hix 2002a, McElroy & Benoit 2010).”