Bulletin n. 1/2012
June 2012
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Proksch Sven-Oliver, Lo James
    Reflections on the European integration dimension
    in European Union Politics , Vol. 13, n. 2, June ,  2012 ,  317-333
    The present economic and political state of the European Union (EU) provides a timely opportunity to reflect on the methodological toolkit of political scientists studying European integration. The political events during the first decade of this century have marked an accelerated and increasingly complex integration process. The EU has managed to overcome Cold War divisions between East and West to include an unprecedented number of countries. At the same time, the EU has successfully reformed its institutions through the Treaty of Lisbon after an almost decade-long process full of obstacles. Following this expansion and institutional reform, the EU faces yet another crossroads after a severe European debt crisis has put the future of the common currency, and thereby the future of political and economic integration of Europe, into question. Knowing where political parties stand on Europe is therefore not just a measurement exercise in political science. Party position measures allow researchers to examine important substantive questions, ranging from explaining how party systems across Europe work, how election campaigns are run, or how governments deal with new economic, fiscal, and political challenges. Scholars studying Europe will therefore continue to demand valid and reliable party position estimates on European integration. Any continued effort to produce data for the scholarly community should thus be complimented. Given the prominence of the integration dimension in research on the European Union, we investigate in this forum section how well parties can be distinguished on this dimension. Using data from different sources, including expert surveys, voter surveys, and roll call votes in the European Parliament (EP), we find that the scale reliability of this dimension may be overstated when the data are analysed across sub-ranges of the scale. Typical cross-validation measures, i.e. correlation coefficients across the full data range, hide an important feature of the data: while …
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