Modelling Roll Call Voting in the European Parliament

• In Event: (European) Parliament Funkadelic

Abstract

How many dimensions suffice to summarize the pattern in roll call votes in the European Parliament (EP)? What best describe these dimensions? The standard theory of politics in the EP, the Hix-Lord model, holds that there are two orthogonal dimensions, Left - Right and Anti - Pro Integration, where the former accounts for more of the variation than the latter. Recently, two modifications to this account have emerged. First, that the policy-space has rotated, such that the Anti - Pro Integration dimension has taken precedence over Left -Right. Second, that these two dimensions are not orthogonal to each other, but correlated. We argue that a dynamic one-dimensional models suffice to predicted roll call voting behaviour in the EP. Taking issue with the practice of evaluate model fit on the basis of within-sample, rather than out-of-sample, we argue that the existing literature has over-fitted models of roll call voting in the EP.

Authors

• Philipp Broniecki, University of Oslo

• Jørgen Bølstad, University of Oslo

• Bjørn Høyland, University of Oslo