Suchergebnisse

The Council of the European Union is the European Union's most powerful legislative body. Yet, we still have limited information about Council politics because of the lack of suitable data. This paper validates a new approach to studying Council politics entitled DICEU - Debates in the Council of the European Union. This approach is the first to leverage the public videos of Council deliberations as a data source. We demonstrate the face, convergent, and predictive validity of DICEU data. Governments' ideal points scaled from these videos yield meaningful and well-known conflict dimensions. Moreover, governments' positions during Council negotiations correlate highly with expert assessments and predict subsequent votes on legislative acts. We conclude that DICEU data provide a promising new approach to studying Council politics and multilevel governance.

Further integration in the European Union (EU) increasingly depends on public legitimacy. The global financial crisis and the subsequent euro area crisis have amplified both the salience and the redistributive consequences of decisions taken in Brussels, raising the question of how this has influenced public support for European integration. In this contribution, we examine how public opinion has responded to the crisis, focusing on support for monetary integration. Interestingly, our results show that support for the euro has remained high within the euro area; however, attitudes are increasingly driven by utilitarian considerations, whereas identity concerns have become less important. While the crisis has been seen to deepen divisions within Europe, our findings suggest that it has also encouraged citizens in the euro area to form opinions on the euro on the basis of a cost–benefit analysis of European economic governance, rather than relying primarily on national attachments.

The role of domestic public opinion is an important topic in research on international negotiations, yet we know little about how exactly it manifests itself. We focus on government rhetoric during negotiations and develop a conceptual distinction between implicit and explicit manifestations of public opinion. Drawing on a database of video recordings of negotiations of the Council of the European Union and a quantitative text analysis of government speeches, we find that public opinion matters implicitly, with the exact pattern depending on governments' stance toward the EU. Pro-EU governments are responsive to public opinion in their support for compromises and attempts to stall negotiations, whereas Euroskeptic governments tend to remain silent when confronted with a public positively disposed toward the EU. Our results show that although governments implicitly represent public opinion, they do not systematically invoke their voters explicitly, suggesting the public matters but in different ways than often assumed.

The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in "text-as-data" methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not regularly transcribed, and their on-demand transcription by humans is prohibitively expensive for research purposes. This class includes political speech in certain legislatures, during political party conferences as well as television interviews and talk shows. We showcase how scholars can use automatic speech recognition systems to analyze such speech with quantitative text analysis models of the "bag-of-words" variety. To probe results for robustness to transcription error, we present an original "word error rate simulation" (WERSIM) procedure implemented in$R$. We demonstrate the potential of automatic speech recognition to address open questions in political science with two substantive applications and discuss its limitations and practical challenges.

The analysis of political texts from parliamentary speeches, party manifestos, social media, or press releases forms the basis of major and growing fields in political science, not least since advances in text-as-data methods have rendered the analysis of large text corpora straightforward. However, a lot of sources of political speech are not regularly transcribed, and their on-demand transcription by humans is prohibitively expensive for research purposes. This class includes political speech in certain legislatures, during political party conferences as well as television interviews and talk shows. We showcase how scholars can use automatic speech recognition systems to analyze such speech with quantitative text analysis models of the bag-of-words variety. To probe results for robustness to transcription error, we present an original word error rate simulation (WERSIM) procedure implemented in . We demonstrate the potential of automatic speech recognition to address open questions in political science with two substantive applications and discuss its limitations and practical challenges.

Are governments responsive to public preferences when legislating in international organizations? This article demonstrates that governments respond to domestic public opinion even when acting at the international level. Specifically, we examine conflict in the European Union's primary legislative body, the Council of the European Union (EU). We argue that domestic electoral incentives compel governments to react to public opinion. Analyzing a unique data set on all legislative decisions adopted in the Council since 1999, we show that governments are more likely to oppose legislative proposals that extend the level and scope of EU authority when their domestic electorates are skeptical about the EU. We also find that governments are more responsive when the issue of European integration is salient in domestic party politics. Our findings demonstrate that governments can use the international stage to signal their responsiveness to public concerns and that such signals resonate in the domestic political debate.

AbstractMuch of the contemporary literature on populism focuses on its status as a "thin" ideology comprising three key components: people-centrism, anti-elitism, and anti-pluralism. Populist politicians pair this "thin" ideology with extreme positions on policy issues such as immigration or taxation (referred to as "host" or "thick" ideologies). A recent study using German samples leveraged conjoint experiments to disentangle the effects of these appeals on vote choice. The results not only showed that extreme host-ideological positions mattered more than so-called "thin" populist appeals, but also that effects of populist appeals were nearly identical among populist and non-populist voters. Our replication in the US context reaffirms both the importance of host-ideological positions and the lack of heterogeneous effects by voters' "thin" populist attitudes. Furthermore, by uncovering some divergence from the German case (e.g. anti-elite appeals trumping people-centric appeals), we highlight the need to experimentally examine the effects of populism's constituent components across contexts.