Introducing COMEPELDA: Comprehensive European Parliament electoral data covering rules, parties and candidates

Abstract

We introduce a new collection of data that consolidates information on European Parliament elections into one comprehensive source. It provides information on formal electoral rules as well as national-level and district-level election results for parties and individual politicians (including full candidate lists). The use of existing and new key variables makes it easy to link the data across the different units of observation (country, party, candidate, member of parliament) and join them with external information. Currently, the data cover four elections (1999–2014). Among other aspects, the collection should facilitate research on the European Parliament's allegedly weak electoral connection. In this article, we outline the main features of the datasets, describe patterns of intra-party competition and preference voting and conduct exploratory analyses of individual-level changes in list positions.

Blurred lines between electoral and parliamentary representation: The use of constituency staff among Members of the European Parliament

“…This is in turn determined by electoral rules (André et al, 2014; Cain et al, 1984; Carey and Shugart, 1995; Farrell and McAllister, 2006; Farrell and Scully, 2010). At the European level, all electoral systems follow proportional representation with variations in the ballot structures between open/flexible and closed lists (Däubler et al, 2021). In closed-list systems, the party determines the order of candidates, and voters can only choose between different party lists.…”

Members of the European Parliament’s Political Careers across Different Levels: Presenting a New Dataset of Members of the European Parliament

“…Obviously, the dataset can be integrated with all these specific resources and several others, according to the proposed research goals. For example, if the aim is to mix and match the MEPs data with the candidate-level information, the COMEPELDA dataset (Däubler et al, 2022) is an extremely valuable resource to be associated with. In particular, because COMEPELDA gathers sensitive data like country-level information (electoral rules), party lists results, data on individual candidates and information on elected MEPs (like mandate type and district affiliation).…”

“…A structured dataset with full information on MEPs’ political backgrounds allows to enquire in details the connections between the EP legislative and electoral dimension by overcoming the limitation in data availability. The existence of other datasets like the COMEPELDA one (Däubler et al, 2022), permits to link the data of the MEPs’ political background and the offices held within the EP to data on national electoral laws, position on party lists and preference votes (where applicable), district affiliation and so on. This provides the unique opportunity for tracing the interplay between the party, the electoral and the institutional arenas at both national and supranational levels for every MEP.…”

Time is on my side? The temporal proximity between elections and parties’ salience strategies

“…Braun and Schmitt, 2020) because they mainly mobilize their voters in first-order election campaigns (Weber, 2007) and, therefore, also focus more on first-order than on second-order election issues to maximize their electoral support. Yet, although EP elections are still considered 'second-order' elections (Reif and Schmitt, 1980;Corbett, 2014;Däubler et al, 2022) and voters continue to use them as an opportunity to punish domestic governments, engage in protest voting, vote sincerely for small parties, or experiment with new ones (Reif, 1984;Weber, 2007) the European content of these elections has increased in recent decades compared to the 1980s and 1990s (Steenbergen and Scott, 2004;Senninger and Wagner, 2015). With regard to national parties' position-taking on and emphasis of EU issues, parties actually try to 'demobilize' voters in domestic election campaigns (Weber, 2007, p. 523 emphasis in original).…”