Marco R. Steenbergen

Measuring party positions in Europe The Chapel Hill expert survey trend file, 1999–2010

This article reports on the 2010 Chapel Hill expert surveys (CHES) and introduces the CHES trend file, which contains measures of national party positioning on European integration, ideology and several European Union (EU) and non-EU policies for 1999−2010. We examine the reliability of expert judgments and cross-validate the 2010 CHES data with data from the Comparative Manifesto Project and the 2009 European Elections Studies survey, and explore basic trends on party positioning since 1999. The dataset is available at the CHES website.

Who’s Cueing Whom? Mass-Elite Linkages and the Future of European Integration

The 2005 French and Dutch referendum campaigns were characterized by an alleged disconnect between pro-European political elites and Eurosceptic masses. Past evidence regarding elite-mass linkages in the context of European integration has been conflicting. Whereas some scholars argue that political elites respond to the changing preferences of their electorates, others suggest that party elites cue the mass public through a process of information and persuasion. We contend that these conflicting results stem from the reciprocal nature of elite-mass linkages and estimate a series of dynamic simultaneous equations models to account for this reverse causation. Using Euro-barometer and expert survey data from 1984-2002, we find evidence of a dual-process model, whereby party elites both respond to and shape the views of their supporters. We also find that the strength of these results is contingent on several factors, including the type of electoral system, intra-party dissent and voter characteristics.

Explaining the salience of anti-elitism and reducing political corruption for political parties in Europe with the 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey data

This article addresses the variation of anti-corruption and anti-elite salience in party positioning across Europe. It demonstrates that while anti-corruption salience is primarily related to the (regional) context in which a party operates, anti-elite salience is primarily a function of party ideology. Extreme left and extreme conservative (TAN) parties are significantly more likely to emphasize anti-elite views. Through its use of the new 2014 Chapel Hill Expert Survey wave, this article also introduces the dataset.

European Integration and Political Conflict: Introduction: Models of political conflict in the European Union

In the era following the Single European Act and the Maastricht Treaty, the European Union has been transformed into a multilevel polity in which European issues have become important not only for national governments, but also for citizens, political parties, interest groups, and social movements. How is conflict over European integration structured? This is the question that this book addresses. The question of contestation over European integration has two related components. First, how do domestic and European political actors conceive the basic alternatives? Can debates over European integration, despite their complexity, be reduced to a relatively small number of dimensions? Does contestation over European integration resolve itself into a single underlying dimension, or does it involve two or more separate dimensions? Second, how is contestation over European integration related, if at all, to the issues that have characterized political life in Western Europe over the past century or more? In particular, how is contestation over European integration related to the left/right divide concerning the role of the state and equality vs. economic freedom? These topics were first raised by neofunctionalists writing in the early days of European integration. Ernst Haas paid close attention to the domestic sources of opposition and support for European integration in his classic study, The Uniting of Europe, published in 1958. However, most scholars continued to view European integration as the result of foreign policies conducted by government elites acting on a “permissive consensus” (Lindberg and Scheingold 1970). European integration was conceived to take place among, but not within, countries. This view became untenable as the European Union became a more openly contested arena for political parties, interest groups, subnational governments, and social movements after the Maastricht Accord of 1991 (Ansell, Parsons, and Darden 1997; Bache forthcoming; Caporaso 1996; Hooghe and Marks 1999; Imig and Tarrow 2001; Peterson and Bomberg 1999; Pollack 2000; Taggart 1998). Comparativists began, once again,

Attitude Variability among Latin American Publics: How Party System Structuration Affects Left/Right Ideology

Political scientists often describe party competition, political behavior or public preferences in left/right terms. Nevertheless, the usefulness of the concepts “left” or “right” is rarely explored. This study assesses whether the left/right continuum resonates with publics in developing Latin American democracies. Using data from the 2008 wave of the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), the authors measure variability in left/right self-placement in three Latin American countries, namely, Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile. Building on the approach developed by Alvarez and Brehm for public opinion in the United States, the authors explore (a) the extent to which voters in Ecuador, Mexico, and Chile possess predicable left/right positions and (b) whether predictability can be attributed to individual- and country-level characteristics. At the individual level, the authors show that variability decreases with political sophistication. At the country level, they find that a lower degree of programmatic party system structuration leads to higher levels of response variation. Mapping the variability in left/right preferences provides important insights into the structure of public opinion and contours of political behavior in Latin America and how they differ from those of other regions such as North America. In addition, this study brings to bear important new individual-level insights into recent political developments in the Latin American region, especially the so-called left turn in Latin American politics.

Variable Opinions: The Predictability of Support for Unification in European Mass Publics

This article explores the extent to which European citizens are now Euro-ambivalent. Over the past decade, authors have argued that public opinion toward European integration has moved from a permissive consensus to a constraining dissensus. This suggests a clear-cut swing from mostly favorable to mostly unfavorable attitudes toward European integration. We argue in this article that public opinion toward European integration is not so clear-cut pro or anti. Rather, it is ambivalent. We explore this ambivalence, its antecedents, and its potential implications for voting behavior in European Parliamentary elections using the 2009 European Election Survey.

Group Ambivalence and Electoral Decision-Making

Recent insights about attitude structure and process have spawned a new understanding of the nature and dynamics of mass opinion. On the structural side, there is mounting evidence that political opinions are more complex than the unidimensional summary statements (e.g., unfavorable or favorable, cold or warm, negative or positive) routinely used to measure them. On the processing side, opinions often are not directly retrieved from memory in summary form but, instead, are constructed episodically on the basis of an “on-the-spot” memory search using whatever considerations are momentarily salient (Tourangeau, Rips, and Rasinski 2000; Zaller and Feldman 1992; but see Lodge, McGraw, and Stroh 1989; Lodge, Steenbergen, and Brau 1995). Although political scientists have only recently begun to incorporate these insights into empirical models of political behavior, they have long recognized that opinions are infused with conflicting beliefs and feelings. The authors of The American Voter wrote, for example, that an individual voter’s “system of partisan attitudes” could be consistently favorable toward one party, or that the elements of the system could be in conflict (Campbell et al. 1960; also see Free and Cantril 1967; Lazarsfeld, Berelson, and Gaudet 1944). Contemporary research suggests further that ambivalence—an internalized conflict about a specific political choice—is a prevalent characteristic of political belief systems, with important implications for how citizens make political decisions.

Anchoring the experts: Using vignettes to compare party ideology across countries

Expert surveys are a valuable, commonly used instrument to measure party positions. Some critics question the cross-national comparability of these measures, though, suggesting that experts may lack a common anchor for fundamental concepts such as economic left–right. Using anchoring vignettes in the 2010 Chapel Hill Expert Survey, we examine the extent of cross-national difference in expert ideological placements. We find limited evidence of cross-national differences; on the whole, our findings further establish expert surveys as a rigorous instrument for measuring party positions in a cross-national context.

Deliberation in Legislatures: Antecedents and Outcomes

In the study of deliberation, classical representative institutions such as legislatures have been largely neglected.1 While students of deliberation have mainly focused on the deliberation in the civic sphere, students of legislatures have mainly concentrated on formal outcomes (e.g., votes) and how these are affected by institutional rules and legislators preferences. One reason for neglecting the topic of deliberation in the context of legislatures is that many political scientists do not conceive of them as genuine deliberative bodies. A fairly typical example is Uhr (1998) who argues that while the major purpose of legislatures is indeed debate and diversity, it does not imply unanimity and rational consensus. While we certainly do not deny that adversarial and rhetorical forms of debate play an important role in legislative interactions, we think that genuine and consequential deliberation is possible in legislatures, but — in line with new institutionally oriented research programs on legislatures (see Doring, 1995) — that this is largely dependent on favorable institutional contexts.

Deliberative inclusion of minorities: patterns of reciprocity among linguistic groups in Switzerland

We present a model of deliberative inclusion, focusing on reciprocity in the interaction between structural minorities/disadvantaged groups and majorities/privileged groups. Our model, however, comes with a ‘friendly amendment’: we have put the ‘burden of reciprocity’ mainly on majorities and privileged groups. It is mainly their obligation to seriously listen and respond to the demands and arguments of minorities and disadvantaged groups and show a willingness to respect and accommodate these interests. Empirically, we apply our model to the interaction of linguistic groups in the Swiss parliament. We find a highly egalitarian, sometimes even minority-favoring mode of interaction between the German-speaking majority and linguistic minorities. The German-speaking majority seems to be willing to take the ‘burden of reciprocity’ when linguistic minorities’ vital interests are concerned. Conversely, linguistic minorities are slightly more self-referential and adversarial under such conditions.