The second edition of the EPAC expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition – testing for validity and reliability

Abstract

This research note presents EPAC 2017, a dataset resulting from the second round of an expert survey on ethnonationalism in party competition. EPAC provides cross-sectional data on the positions of (ethno-) national and mainstream parties on an ethnonational (also often referred to as 'territorial' or 'centre-periphery') dimension, as well as other important dimensions of political competition. The 2017 edition covers 222 political parties in 22 multinational European countries. The research note presents the main survey items and performs a series of validity and reliability tests on the data. Results show that EPAC 2017 provides valid and reliable measures of party positions on an ethnonational dimension. A short analysis of party system changes in Spain and Bosnia and Herzegovina illustrates the opportunities of combining the 2011 and 2017 editions. The combined dataset allows studying the mobilization of the centre-periphery cleavage in party competition across Eastern and Western Europe and over time.

Language difference and regional authority

“…Comparative regional-level data on public opinion, elites, social movements, and political parties are now available for much of the developed world (e.g. Schakel and Romanova 2018;Tatham and Bauer 2016;Zuber and Szöcsik 2019). Commensurate data would be immensely valuable for a wider range of regions.…”

How party competition shapes ethnic parties’ positions on migration and immigration

“…2 Based on party programmes and official websites, we carefully determine in a first step whether a party has an ethnic electorate, and which ethnic group the party seeks to represent. In a second step, we use the Ethnonationalism in Party Competition (EPAC) dataset, which contains information for a subset of the parties in our sample, to evaluate the robustness of our codings (Zuber and Szöcsik, 2019). This operationalization is superior to relying on overly broad categories such as the 'ethnic and regional' party family in the MARPOR dataset or an automated namebased identification (Ishiyama and Breuning, 2011).…”

Thirty years of Regional and Federal Studies

“…Researchers are also developing subnational datasets and indicators within specific policy domains such as climate competence (Bromley-Trujillo and Holman 2020), EU affairs (Tatham 2011), welfare (Giraudy and Pribble 2019) or immigration (Zuber 2020). In the same vein, a comparable effort is observed when it comes to coding or quantifying different aspects of territorial actors, such as various types of parties (Zuber and Szöcsik 2019) or of interest groups (López and Tatham 2018). In sum, scholars are getting a better understanding of institutions and actors evolving at the territorial level and are feeding these insights back into mainstream political science enquiries.…”