Suchergebnisse

A variety of methodologies have been employed in order to measure the positions of political parties on the issue of European Integration. This paper compares four types of measures of party position: reputational, textual, behavioral, and self reported indicators. These indicators are assessed in terms of their content validity, convergent validity, and, construct validity. All of these approaches yield plausible measures which correlate reasonably well with each other, although care must be taken with the creation indices from the Comparative Manifesto Project dataset. However, these indicators are not interchangeable, and the results of substantive research on EU politics are dependent, to an alarming extent, on the choice of indicators. Careful attention should paid to the choice of measures, and the theoretical justification of any measure used. Future researchers would be well advised test whether their results are robust across alternative measures of party positions. [Copyright 2006 Elsevier Ltd.]

According to some recent work on the attitudes towards European integration, supporters of incumbent parties are generally more pro-European than supporters of opposition parties. However, there are theoretical reasons to expect supporters of governing parties to be skeptical of European integration. Upon closer examination, the relationship between incumbent support and pro-European Union (EU) attitudes is a conditional one, which appears primarily when referendums are held on European topics or during European Parliament (EP) election years. At other times, there is a weak positive relationship between incumbent support and support for the current European Union, but a negative relationship with support for further unification. This suggests that supporters of incumbent parties are not natural advocates for reform of the institutions of the EU.