Do European Parliament Elections Impact National Party System Fragmentation?

Strategic Non-Voting in European Parliament Elections

Explaining support for the UK Independence Party at the 2009 European Parliament elections

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) achieved its best result in the 2009 European elections, beating the governing Labour Party into second place. Despite its recent success we still know relatively little about who votes for the party and how these supporters compare with those of UKIP’s competitors. This paper analyses support for UKIP at the 2009 European elections first at the aggregate level,...

Weather conditions and political party vote share in Dutch national parliament elections, 1971–2010

Inclement weather on election day is widely seen to benefit certain political parties at the expense of others. Empirical evidence for this weather-vote share hypothesis is sparse however. We examine the effects of rainfall and temperature on share of the votes of eight political parties that participated in 13 national parliament elections, held in the Netherlands from 1971 to 2010. This paper...

Predicting Party Affiliations from European Parliament Debates

This paper documents an ongoing effort to assess whether party group affiliation of participants in European Parliament debates can be automatically predicted on the basis of the content of their speeches, using a support vector machine multi-class model. The work represents a joint effort between researchers within Political Science and Language Technology.

The European Parliament Ready for the Future? The Impact of Enlargement on the European Parliament

The first European elections in the Union of 25 were held on 10-13 June 2004. As a result, the European Parliament has become the world’s largest democratically-elected parliamentary chamber, having grown from 198 members before the first direct elections in 1979 to the present total of 732, bringing together representatives of over 100 different political parties from across a continent. The f...